I think it's in the works. I could be wrong.

@McCains potatoe face: I think you are wrong
@Subject There was one for a bit, which people set up on one of the major IRC networks.
Thing is, most people don't bother looking at it, and actually having conversations in threads like these does help keep them (vaguely) organised

I love how you come up with a new name for me every time you reply to me. It's amusing.

Well they have live chat on some of the other sites, I somewhat assumed that it would be ported here at some time.

@#9786 - Thanks. Its starting to get more difficult now though!
I guess you'd have to ask Kestas, but given the effect a chatroom would have on server load I don't think it's likely. We might see auto-loading message boxes, but I'm not 100%
Also I'm pretty sure there's a thread about this somewhere on the dev forum (http://forum.webdiplomacy.net) - but I can't find it atm

I have to say though that it's not something 90% of site users need to use...

Thanks figle, I suspected that about the server load issue.

I suppose the forum posting also serves well to hold the personalities to account for what they say etc. and keeps the subjects intact.
Nevertheless it's a lively atmosphere and would make for a better quality chat than most sites given the opinionated nature of the personalities. Instead of having my points stolen by live gunboaters who send each other little signals by supporting each others moves so they can form alliances I could jump into an equally pointless debate about something trivial but interesting nevertheless...
@figle: is there any other way of for example setting up a link on the site to an external service such as the aforementioned IRC?
Or what about this: set up a post thread as with the live games so people can find vacant chatrooms or channels somewhere and post the current address of any activity with the time to confirm where the action is to any site browsers.

i'm not an expert on chatrooms or irc, so if someone makes a good suggestion I'll try to be the one who 'bumps' it up in the ratings.

IRC channel on Freenode +1

Will check it out, Bezborodov.

My cookie cutter response for all feature requests:

"Sounds like a great idea, user! When do you plan to start coding it?"

@Stratagos: I don't plan to.
I'm one of the many who takes advantage of other peoples hard work and free sites and expects to be provided with entertainment endlessly, although in my case I prefer to interact rather than sit and watch TV news.
Anyhow, these days the tools are ready made and relatively easy to integrate, are they not? This is such a unique type of community atmosphere it's a shame there's no quick link at least.

@Bezborodov, could you be more specific about the channel name?

Define "easy to integrate". To a non-coder, it would seem so, but to those of us in the know, it isn't as "easy" as one might think.

@Draug - To be fair, for a chatroom it can be really easy. There are complete prewritten frameworks you can just copy in.
Good luck setting one up on an IRC channel if you want, but honestly I doubt you'll have much life on it after the first few days :/

But integrating them into the game itself is what I was thinking wouldn't be so easy, Ghost. Frameworks are only so "easy" to integrate and occassionally need tweaking to meet specific needs. For instance, Telerik's reporting framework is great but I've had to make some major tweaks and build another layer to it to make it do what I need for our development needs at my employer.

heh, feel free to blame ghost for the laziness of my arguement :P

I didn't realise you were thinking about having them for games. In those cases agreed, it'd probably be easiest just to write one from scratch.
As far as keeping down server load whilst increasing capabilities goes, for some time its been in the back of my mind that currently everything is loaded from the same server - but there's no reason it has to be.

Hmmmm... I keep offering to help in some way and I have this server at home doing nothing but acting as my DNS and AD server...

Can I run a proxy tunnel through it? That would help (me) :)

@figle thanks for the input, matter resolved.
@Draugnar, don't go feeling under appreciated, it's human nature to take hard working suffering intellectuals such as yourself for granted. If you like you and I can debate the topic here in the forum, or on and IRC channel, or even by instant messenger software....
anyway, how did you know I was a non-coder? I could be a lazy, arrogant amateur hacker who reckons he's a match for a pro....

Can't access one of the existing ones I'm guessing?

And my provider might have a problem with that use of the bandwidth. I'd probably have to upgrade from a sticky IP home account to a fixed IP business account.

"@Stratagos: I don't plan to.
I'm one of the many who takes advantage of other peoples hard work and free sites and expects to be provided with entertainment endlessly, although in my case I prefer to interact rather than sit and watch TV news."


heh Best response ever.


As may have been mentioned, LeRoi and I tried very hard to do this once before. We had a chat room and everything. We advertised heavily on the forum, but very few people were interested (hellalt is the only one I remember). If someone is willing to try again, I would be interested, but I'm not very hopeful.

The trouble is that only works for public chat. To try and do a full press would mean 22 total rooms (21 privbate rooms plus a global one) and password protection to keep snoops from looking in on the private chats.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the OP was not talking about IRC for games, but as an addition to the forum.

You are correct. Mea Culpa.