Thanks!
To elaborate a bit about the design decisions; in absence of a more profession artist, the look&feel of the chat is kept as close to the forums as possible. The chat might keep its own tab or be integrated-- this is something for D-Mac and/or Supersonic to decide.
It's possible to create your own chatroom, and PM each other-- I've retained as much freedom as possible. Your nick is a noteworthy exception. When the chat is closely connected to, or even hosted by the same provider as the spcforums, it would be unthinkable that a nickname can be trivially spoofed (meaning: anything less than cracking someone's forum account).
I've thought of several solutions to allow nick changes, but none are obvious to a new user. Clarity before anything, so no nick changes.
The software seems to make up a nick color at random. This is just stupid and will be changed. Changed in what way? Dunno yet. Suggestions?
At the moment, the spcforums admins & moderators, and of course our Bunny Princess, have ops (admin privileges for the IRC illiterates) on the chat. However a forum isn't a chat so I don't consider that policy absolute (no offense fellow admins, moderators and Bunny Princess
)
I didn't prefer an web-to-IRC gateway since most IRC networks don't allow more than a few users originating from the same web spot (IP address). It'd get k-lined or something IRCish like that :] Not to mention DDOSed, flooded et cetera. On top of that, there's no way to know for certain that one's nick is free on the IRC network.
Giving away control is generally a bad thing on the internet. No company in their right mind would just give away stuff
(in this case a chat framework/service) without getting something useful back
(hmmm maybe the topics people like to chat about?). So 3rd party chat framework/service providers were never considered. Now please don't go posting that our friendly Big Brother Google really
is that altruistic without any kind of ulterior motive
And really, if you have suggestions, comments, want to complain or whatever, please post it (or PM me)!
For example, I can image it being useful to somehow hyperlink from the chat to some spcforums post. Or to a torrent or youtube video somewhere. Now I needn't mention the dangers of allowing links to any kind of file, or allowing html in general, so that won't happen. But would some sort of controlled convenience feature like this be useful?
Author
