I know the chat feature was popular with some people and this was an experiment to see how it would work. Over the weekend, I received word from a list I subscribe to of a security hole in that software so I removed it. The staff is discussing an option to add chat to the site in an optional pop-up window so that only those that wanted to use it would see it. But, this option is expensive. As we would not spend money that was contributed to pay the bills on this, it would require fundraising from people that wanted to use it. We have still not determined whether or not we want to add this feature or not and we may solicit comments soon. Charlie
Charlie .. as I remember, I believe that Lady Sunshine started a 'chat room' for Aministrators & Moderators about a year ago, or so. I believe it was located at Yahoo. I went there several times, but could never connect with others, even though it was evident they had been there. Perhaps this would be an option? Merry Christmas & Happy New Year everyone!
Bill, Yahoo took away the chat features cause of those low life pedofiles who used it to troll for kids to seduce. MSN took their chat feature away too. The disabled chat group i belong to we use Yahoo Messenger now for our chats. We just posted that if you wanted to use Yahoo Messenger to post your ID and all of us would add that ID to our buddy list to know when someone wanted to join the chat. I deleted that group after they took away the chat feature. http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/messenger/messenger8/chat/chat-25.html
Seems to me like Barb his the nail on the head with her idea. How about just making a thread for everyone to post their AOL, Yahoo, etc. handles in and letting an established and reliable network handle the chat? Won't cost you anything and it will basically be self-policed.
You can get a free chat room at chatzy. Once you set it up, you can send out invitations to those you want to be able to use it, or just post the url and the password and make it available to everyone.
This software already has that feature. Note the Yahoo Instant Messenger icon where it shows my post count, etc. People can enter their ICQ numbers, etc. No, these would not be solutions for us. The only kind of solution we would consider would be something that integrated with the MySQL database that drives these forums, RailImages, TrainBlog, TrainStore, etc. There is one package that we would use if we added this and nothing else would be considered. Charlie
