The new chat room is delayed – but coming

We have been working on a new version of the chat room for most of this year, and I know many are excited about the new features, as well as disappointed that it has not rolled out to the public yet. I must apologize that it has taken so long! We want to add so many new features for the users that it is taking much longer than expected.

The most important new feature is taking the longest for us to incorporate. Having the ability for our regular users to “own” their screen name is something that many of us want, and adding that the right way is taking time. We had that function working working, along with the other new features, but having the little avatar next to the screen name in the chat room proved to be a problem when connecting the database to the chat room. After spending months of time hacking code and even bring in some additional coding help, we had to scrap all of that work. We are now working with a different backend database system, and so far it seems that it is going to work as we intended!

Other new features include alphabetizing the list of people in the room, and functions to make moderation easier and faster for the mods. We are also developing some other goodies and working on new graphics for the emoticons.

We are still taking suggestions from our users, feel free to comment on our suggestions page and we’ll do our best to add them! Thanks for the patience and understanding, we are still working on it! A big thanks to our volunteer moderators as well, I know the current system is a lot of work, and you all are really appreciated!

Steve Nashvegas