I am waiting for one last piece to fall into place and the site will be switching servers. The new server will fix the issues with the search, as well as a few other bugs. The change will take place around the end of the year. I'll let everyone know the exact date as soon as I can.

If the chat will be switching over to the one found from the Alt-Chat link now on the left column, I can forsee one minor difficulty with it.

In the current chat, it's fairly easy to change your name (with the /nick function) so that you can use one login name for all of your characters. The new chat does not seem to have a function like that, which means that people who want to use the chat for IC functions will need a different login name for each character.

I'm trying to decide if the ability to make new rooms (to work privately on fiction planning, I suppose, or maybe it's just for Chloe/Satyr ) makes up for it.

I already have different logins for each of my characters in the chat. It's not biggy to me, especially if they all have the same password. Heh.

Sheesh... use a private room for fiction dialogue once...

But to add my two cents, I forsee not only the nick issue (which isn't a huge issue for me personally), but the color issue. We're all a highly individual bunch, and we're going to have coordination issues as some of us go for dark text on light backgrounds while others pick light text on dark backgrounds. We're going to need to *gasp!* agree on something. Can we build a custom theme that will allow for the greatest range of text variation?

There is the option to have all the text come in as the same color. While I don't particularly want to do that, it is an option.

I'll continue to do testing and there may be a few other chat alternatives available over the next week or 2 for people to try out. I may end up staying with what we currently have.

The new server is active and does fix a lot of the problems that exist here. I have some more testing to do then I'll make the switch. It will probably happen either over the Christmas weekend or more likely the New Years weekend.

To be honest, the different colored text helps me "see" people and I can scan for them more easily. I'd prefer to have a set or agreed upon background, like we do now in our chat.

Umm...a language filter? Why not just cut my tongue out?

I'm opposed to the language filter, also. If we can curse in the forums, why not in chat?

Is that an option? The filter is no more.

Some of these things I don't even notice. When I test software, checking to see if I can type foul language isn't really on my list of things to look for. That's why I'm giving everyone the opportunity to beta test things.

So it is! Thanks, Chosen!!

And I'm ashamed to say it took me about fifteen seconds to find out.

One other thing of note about the new chat is that I increased the amount of text possible truncation by a factor of 10. I don't recall who asked about that the other night, but it is now improved.

So which chat do people think should be the primary chat?

And we are back to the old chat software.

Why?

I didn't find anything terribly wrong with the new chat software...

Well, perhaps because almost no one responded with any of the issues they had until Chosen showed up in chat. With the exception of "Why can't I say f###?" there was a derth of silence.

Everyone that I talked to was in favor of keeping the existing chat, so that what I'm going to try and do.

I guess it's a little late, but I liked the new chat software, and I appreciate the effort that was put into it. It takes a little while to get used to, sure, but it's vastly preferable in the long run.

Xenophobic cockblockery. Fuck.

Again, Chosen only knows what people tell him. If you see something you like that is being tested and you don't say anything he's got no chance of knowing.

Speak up people!

I just finished testing the new server and all my preliminary tests were positive. It is a bit slower than this one, but everything that I believe we need is working properly.

I will begin the server switch on Friday the 29th of December at approximately 9 am EST. The forum will be closed for 30-60 minutes while I perform a backup on this server. I will change nprime.net so that it points to the new server at this point in time. However, it take anywhere from 4-48 hours to propagate through every ISP. You'll know that you are on the new server when you see the site's regular blue, gray & white colors.

At ~10 I will restart the forum, but any post made between 10 and the DNS switch will not be transferred over to the new site. For that reason you should either hold off on posting, or make a copy of your posts so you can repost them to the new site.

Sorry for the delay. I had hoped to finish the switch before my meeting but hit a small snag. Please let me know if there are any problems.

Lookin' alive and five!

Well..... almost five. Looks like a lot of avatars didn't come across.

Ok, I think all the avatars are now over.

Um, not to be contrary or anything... but now ALL of the avatars seem to be gone....

A-firm that, P-W.

K, I think they are back to normal again. There was an issue with people uploading their own avatars, which is what I was working on that cause the problem for the other avatars to not appear.

Looks like it's all fives, Chosen. Thanks!

Seems things are working when you check the latest post, but this thread doesn't display when you click on the thread from the forum.

(Never mind, it seems to have fixed itself)

The chat has been a bit ropey for me ever since the move. If I log on without clicking Safe Mode it times out after a few minutes, and if I log on with Safe Mode it is sluggish and slow to respond.

I have the same difficulty in the chat as Vixen does.

Likewise for me. Safe mode keeps me in, anything else has me booted out at least every 2-3 minutes.

I'll try something and see if that helps. The chat has always been quirky, depending on your location. It works great for me on 1 computer and not so well on the other. And the computer it works better on is about half the speed of the computer in which it is sluggish.

Yeah, I can also vouch for what they described above. I was on night before last and everyone seemed to be having the same issues.

I'm testing a new version of the chat which can be found in this link. Please let me know if it works better or worse for you.

I get...

Try it again. I left out a letter in the link.

I don't know if this is happening for anyone else, but in Firebox 1.5 and home and IE 6 at work I'm no longer being taken to the first unread message when I go into a thread with unread messages. I don't think that I'm even getting the 'new' icon on the messages. I dumped cookies at work so I'm pretty sure it's not a cookie issue.

Anyone else?