The Unseen Servant forums

I've installed a simple chat room on the forums. You can get to it by using the link at the top right of each page that says 'Chat [x]'. The x in the link will be the number of people that are currently in the chat room. And if you hover your pointer over the link, a tool-tip will pop up showing you a list of those people in the chatroom.

Also, at the bottom of the main forum page, in the section 'Who is online', where it lists the users that are currently browsing the forums, any that are in the chat room are shown with an asterisk after their name.

Once you're in the chat, you can hang in the 'lobby' area (the default room), or go to a different room by using the 'channel' pulldown. Each forum here has its own room. Soon I will prune that list to remove some of the chat channels for games that are dead or complete, or for other rooms that don't need to be there.

I envision this being used for

• Being social and getting to know each other
• Playing some real-time parts of your PbP game. Maybe groups can organize times when everyone in a campaign can get in the chat for a couple hours on a weekend.
• Discussion with your DM about anything: char creation, etc.
• ???

Thanks to Mithrander for turning me onto this great chat software. It has a very low impact on the forums, and when upgrades are released, hopefully the chat function will not break. But if it does, it won't affect the forums themselves (at least I hope not)

I've modified and configured the code a bit so that the following changes/additions have been made:

• There is now an AFK command. Simply enter '/afk' (no single quotes) and you will be marked as AFK ('away from keyboard') in the user list on the right. If you set yourself as AFK, that status is removed as soon as you type your next command or chat.
• Added a welcome message just because.
• Pruned the list of channels to those of only active games. If your game is not listed and you'd like it to be, or if anyone would like to make some other channel, let me know.This broke the chat. I've gotta look into this further.