News Index: System News   <<  Page 7 of 7  >>  June 24, 2008 Members Section Overhaul We are in the process of overhauling the members section. Over the years members functions have gotten spread out all over the chat site making it an inconvenient mess. It's long overdue to make it all on a couple of cleanly designed pages. The new members section will have avatar storage with the HTML code generated below the image you upload from your computer. The profile generator will now store unlimited profiles and you will be able to see the AV's and code conveniently close by. Things like changing your password and screen name will also be located on this page. Also one login to this page will work across all our chatservers which will come in handy because the next version of the chatserver will support clustering which will mean we will have 7 chat servers. This will increase reliability but would be a pain in the ass if we didn't consolidate logins across the cluster. We are also adding a page of "Bonus software" and software that can come in handy. Browser upgrades, Firefox addons,Personal webservers, Chatro's own HDTV over the net solution and tons of other goodies. All this is intended to make it easier and quicker to do what you came here to do..Chat. For members we will be adding the ability to move from room to room without having to relog in. Add in an industrial strength squelch which will even squelch users on your list before they enter and I think we have a nice little pile of improvements. The new members interface has already past the mockup stage and into coding/interface. So that should hit the site rather quickly. As always if we have forgotten anything let us know.  June 18, 2008 Preparing for Additional Rooms We will be adding 20-60 new rooms when we release the new chat server. To prepare for the extra space we will be starting an advertising run Today. The ad run will bring in 100,000 new users per week until the release of the new server. No sense having a more powerful server and room for 1800 more users and not filling up the rooms. For the advertising run we will be concentrating on users female age 26-34 male 30-42 years old. This should fill some gaps we have in demographics and add some new and interesting people. This will be in addition to the normal 5-10K we normally get from search engines. If the ad run takes us where we want to be we will increase it to 1,000,000 per month and concentrate on U.K and users from other country's.  June 10, 2008 New Chatserver We are to the point where we are collecting wishes for features of the new server. The best always come from users. Heres some for example. An improved squelch. When you squelch someone they can still telegraph you. So we are making it when you squelch someone that they can no longer telegraph you. Before you had to turn off telegraphs for everyone. Also the away button. I know sometimes I hit "away" and forget about it. We will have the button change color or indicate your status in some way. Personal banned list. Let users defined an additional banned list so you never even have to squelch people you never even know they enter the room. These are just a few improvements. We are always looking for more so don't hesitate to let us know what you think. We will also have one on one audio/video messaging. A plug in for firefox to keep track of friends on chatro. Room message boards. One click kiddie porn reporting. Then there is always the surprise or two we will come up with.  June 09, 2008 Rob-O-Meter HOAX I hate to even give these morons recognition but some people are freaked out out (About a dozen out of millions). If you are being told your post is censored or your PM's seem to be reposting it's a hoax. Part of the hoax is due to a browser exploit. A message is put in your "message prefix". If you simply go to "Config" while in a room you will see it and can remove it. This is a browser exploit and has nothing to do with Chatro. We are identifying the browsers and the exploit and will have a fix shortly. The same is true about the reading of PM's. I have gone over 1000's of logs and Old Rob-o-meter isn't doing shit. It's a cobination of a very bored person with too many computers. It's kind of pathetic but it is harmless. If you have any questions please call our support line.  May 23, 2008 Yesterdays Problem/Tomorrows Improvements On May 22nd we had a small problem. Users could not connect to the site or would get a server not found error. Without getting to technical this was a DNS problem. Why it reared it's ugly head yesterday and not a couple of years ago will always be a mystery. It has been corrected but it may take a day or so for some ISP's to update the information. Sorry for the inconvenience. This weekend we will start on renaming/theming dead rooms. We will start in the bars section. We will keep "Nifty Fifty's","Billy Bobs Bar" and "Celebrity Chat". The rest of the rooms will get new names, better descriptions and should get more attention. If this does well we will take each section at a time and rename empty rooms. After we have what is in place working well we will proceed to ad 20-60 new rooms. Maybe even a couple of new topic areas. One new section I want to add is LANG. Alternate language rooms that require native speakers to have that languages keyboard. We will most likely start with Spanish and move  May 19, 2008 GeoLocation on Chatropolis? If you have spent any time here during the years you know privacy of our users is a priority. We don't ask for email,credit card or info to chat here. That will never change. I have been testing and playing with an idea. Our users vary from mainly the U.S/U.K and Canada. But we are also in the top 150 sites visited by people in Botswana. Go figure. What I was thinking of was having the whochat pages have the country flag of users. It would allow people to find people in their own country. Since it would only narrow down the public info to a Country I think that wouldn't have any real opposition. Plus it would be configurable to show your flag or not. But as with any change there is always some opposition. Doing this would also allow us to customize things like local weather, holidays and more. We can also add a section devoted to Non-English speaking rooms. As always we wany your feedback(More..)  May 13, 2008 New Toolbox/More Chatrooms It's been about 7 years since we updated the chatroom "Toolbox". If anything is due for an overhaul the Toolbox is. We will be integrating it shortly and then expanding it's capability's. For now we've added 30 or so emoticons. When the new chatserver debuts we will add some new features. For now you can check out the non functional prototype. A mockup of it is here. If there is any function you would like to see added, as always just let us know. It's also that time when we add rooms and change some topics of existing rooms. It looks like we will change topics of most of the "Bars" section and add a dozen or so more rooms. If there is a topic you want covered or special room actions please call one of our numbers on the Tech Support page. We are going to coordinate the new names/rooms with an advertising campaign. (More..)  May 06, 2008 New Chat Server After looking at the current chat server code it has become clear that doing the modifications we want would break the current server. The current code is 5 years old and we've learned a lot since then. This isn't all that bad because huge portions of the new server are already written. The best guess is the new server will take 30 days to implement. The main reason for the new server is to support clustering. Instead of having 2 chat servers the new server will allow us to have seven. It will also allow us to integrate some spambot protection. The new server will also eliminate the need to login more than once. A single login will allow Members to move effortlessly across all chat servers We will also add some bells and whistles. Although it will probably not make the first new release Video chatting