New Chat Room Features

UPDATE:You will notice a small strip at the bottom of your screen with all of your chat room controls.

In late Feb 09' there will be new chatroom features, the good news is all the great features you have on chat today, such as private chats will still be featured in the next version:
Chat will be persistent on every page of your social network.
With this new release, chat will become a bar across the bottom of every page of your social network (see screenshots after the jump). It will start in “bar mode” and will expand into “window mode”. It will have a simple, consistent look across the social networks.

You will be able to pop chat out of your network and keep it open as its own window.
This is something many of you asked for and we’re happy to provide it in this next version.
Sound notifications when messages are received. Notifications start OFF by default, but can be turned on through the options menu.

Members will appear online more accurately.
Because chat is now persistent across all pages on Mohawks Rock, members will be displayed as online more accurately. However, there will still be the option for a member to make themselves invisible, if they choose.
Reconnections will be more graceful. When a connection to the server is lost for some reason, chat will attempt to reconnect gracefully without requiring a page refresh, and if possible without affecting the member. There will be no more need to reload the page entirely and lose all your messages.

Chat will now load the entire scrollable list of people online.
No more clicking on ‘More’!. As a result, search will now be faster too.
Better support for firewalls. This new version uses only port 80, the standard HTTP port.

There will be local message history.
Your chat client will now remember the last ten messages sent and allows to look at them by pressing Ctrl+UP and Ctrl+DOWN (arrow keys).

Chat will now be in Flash.
This means that you need to have a minimum of Flash 9 on your computer. You likely already have Flash 9

Comment by Giant Mohawk Man on February 28, 2009 at 9:22pm: Comments from some of the chat users on MohawksRock.com

1) Resizing both bigger and smaller would help a lot.

2) More Smiley Options

3) Report Abuse option is gone

4) Blocking a particular user you don’t want to see their chats

5) Auto-links in the chat window

6) Copy-Paste formatting looked all jacked when I pasted the above into our chat room to make sure we had covered the main things we missed.

Comment by Kobalos on April 5, 2009 at 6:06pm: I have more troubles with Firefox with chat sometimes than IE now since the recent update. Though, I think it might be a server issue rather than on our PC's. I've tried clearing all cookies & pages or disconnecting and getting a new IP from my ISP, and those things don't fix it, sadly. =)

More often it's a case of just trying either the chat over a page; in a pop-out window or running it in a different program (like IE instead of FF). But there's no consistency to the solution.

I like the sound of those new features above, but it's the recent stability issues with chat that cause most problems. :D Stll, tell the developers that they're hard work is appreciated!