Reply To: Chat room?
Christophano:
Does the forum as it is cause problems for our dial-up users? The Vanilla software is pretty smooth (mainly because it’s not got all the bloated extras that are associated with phpBB et al) already, so it may have to be tested before implementation.
Mucklet’s answered your question already, but that’s definitely one of the good things about Vanilla, and one of the things that make me hesitant to go feature-heavy. I know a lot of the things on jonathancoulton.com proper are targeted at high-speed Internetters but set up not to slow down dial-up too much (streamed audio, YouTube, etc.), and I’d hope that the things we’re adding would still be congenial to slow connections.
three08:
even if it doesn’t, hypothetically could you have a checkbox in the account options list for whether that’s enabled? or maybe if the program has an option where you can disable automatic refreshing and just have a button?
I hope that’s an option, but I really don’t know — see, this is where that test server I mentioned a couple posts up would come in useful.
muckalarkuary:
I have no idea what IRC is. It has been explained to me a couple times before, but I didn’t follow.
Hm, I’m definitely not the guy who should be explaining this, but the people who ought to be explaining will be around to correct me in a moment.
IRC, as I understand it, works roughly like this: There are a bunch of servers out there, and each server has a list of “channels”. Every channel is like its own little chatroom. So you log on to one server, choose your channel, and you can chat (basically, “instant message”) with everyone in that channel. You can be on multiple channels at once on the same server, and depending on what program you use, I think you can also log in to multiple servers, but that may not always work. It has a lot of more “advanced” features, but that’s really all you need to start using it. (You can also communicate privately.)
So why use IRC instead of some random chat program? In the other IRC thread, mtgordon made the comparison to e-mail. There are a lot of different things you could use to access e-mail (you could use an e-mail program like Thunderbird or Outlook, or you can sometimes use your browser), but they can all communicate with one another because they all use the same kind of rules for what format you use for e-mail.
On the other hand, if you use specific instant-messaging services like AIM or MSN or something, a lot of the time you’ll have trouble communicating with people using different programs from you. But unless someone’s using something really non-standard, you shouldn’t ever run into the problem of not being able to send e-mail to someone else because they use a different e-mail program than you do.
In the same way, no matter which IRC program (or “client”) you choose, you’ll be able to connect with everyone else in the same place. (Of course, newer instant-messaging programs like Jabber or Pidgin are designed to be able to communicate with all the different instant-messaging services. But that’s a relatively recent development, I take it.)
Further, as I understand it, IRC is kind of a different mentality. The instant-messaging programs are designed with one-to-one chat first; IRC was built for multi-user chat. IRC channels don’t disappear when everyone leaves, and you don’t have to invite people to enter public channels. It’s been around longer than any of the instant messengers, so it’s kinda got its own established infrastructure already.
I have run out of fake knowledge about all these things I’ve never used, so I’ll stop here. Please pardon any errors I’ve made.