The Shout Box, which is working very much like a chat, will soon be disabled. This may be temporarily, or it may be for good. It depends if our alternative method's of chat are liked by the users, and it depends on the alternative methods' bandwidth consumption.

The price of you all getting a chat system so quickly is that we have not had time to test out the alternatives and decide which system works best for Portkey. I have a few concerns with the Shout Box system, the first one being that the chat does a complete refresh every time it updates, and therefore uses up a lot more bandwidth than it needs to use up. We may also have trouble moderating such a chat system, as there are no real moderation functions in place.

I've moved on to a different chat system. If this new system is liked by the users and isn't as bandwidth intensive as the Shout Box system, then I will probably end up modifying the system to suite the forums and to better suite the website.

The new Chat script can be found at: http://chat.portkey.org, and I invite all of you to get using that so that we can watch the bandwidth consumption and begin to get feedback on that chat system. I'm planning to implement a link to it from the forums just like has been done with the Shout Box.

The alternative chat system appeals to me for the following reasons;

- The system can support unlimited rooms, and users can, if the administrator enables it, create their own rooms - and these rooms can be public (so that the room shows up on the room list) or private, so that nobody can see the room and you need the actual room address to join it.

- Easy to Moderate. We can easily remove disruptive people from the various channels. The person who created a private or public channel can give people moderator access to their channel, and moderators can kick users from the channel.

- It doesn't refresh the whole page every few seconds. It will only refresh to see new messages that have been made, and will only download those new messages and display them in the chat window. This also means that there wont be 'flickering' as there was with the shout box, as the entire page doesn't reload.

- Private Messages - it is possible to send a message so that just one other user sees it, instead of sending it to everybody.

- Users can set the refresh time that the chat takes to check messages. People on a slower connection can chose to have it check for new messages slower so that their internet connection isn't used up so much by the chat.

The one and only downside to this chat system, that I can see, is that it isn't, at the moment, integrated with the forums. If it is successful and liked by the users, then it may well become integrated.

I can understand that people will be asking why we can't just stick with the shout box, as it is more convenient. Simple answer - because it will eat through our bandwidth. We aren't at a stage, currently, to worry significantly about bandwidth. However, Portkey has been running only 3 months, and yet it has experienced growth at an unbelievable rate. The trend seems to be that each month, the hits we get on the site times themselves by about 4. The Portkey.org Forums last month used 8 times the amount of data that was used the previous month. We have to be planning everything with bandwidth in mind. Especially considering the growth of the fanfiction on the site. More fanfictions will inevitably mean that people read more off the website.

I would appreciate it if people would post any feedback or comments they may have on the new chat in this thread.

The chat can be found at: http://chat.portkey.org

Thank you for understanding,
James

I like the new chat better, mainly for the reloading style...I agree that you should work in a link to the forums, thatwould be much appreciated. Keep up the good work, James!
~Batgirl

As always (i think i can speak for BG here ) we send you our love for the chat room James!