The Chat Bar is going to be unavailable for a period while it's updated to a new version.

I'll post here when it is available again.

Well then I'm not even going to bother taking any turns today if I have absolutely no chance of people coming on chat and complaining about my last turn!

The chat bar has been upgraded to the new version. New features are:

• Popout chatrooms
• Ability to create your own private chatrooms e.g. for in-game chat
• Notifications when players come online

There's one little bug / feature which I've spotted which is when switching between pages it doesn't keep you inside the same chatroom - although you can get around this by 'popping out' the chatroom into a separate window.

Overall it seems like a few improvements so let's see how we go with it. One thing that is very noticeable though from the server logs over the last 24 hours is that the performance of the site is significantly better when the chat bar is turned off. I've added some caching features to mitigate this but if it continues to slow the site down it MAY have to be disabled permanently.

tom wrote:

Overall it seems like a few improvements so let's see how we go with it. One thing that is very noticeable though from the server logs over the last 24 hours is that the performance of the site is significantly better when the chat bar is turned off. I've added some caching features to mitigate this but if it continues to slow the site down it MAY have to be disabled permanently.

That stinks!

Ummm, although I don't see the Chat Bar right now anyhow (I check the setting too).

Oops - it was still only enabled for testing - should be there now.

Isn't this new version suppose to detach from the window?  Mine doesn't.

It's just the chatroom which can be detached. (popped out)

I'm already noticing the site being slower than it was last night when the chat bar was off.  Personally, I don't like it and don't really see the need for it.  Really, it just annoys me.  I go offline and people still chat with me, I go invisible and people still chat with me, I change my status to "Please leave me alone" and people still chat with me.  The times that I have acutally used it I could have used a PM instead.

I know Cisco kid got a large tournament going by using it and that is pretty cool but if that is going to be the argument for keeping the chat bar and slowing down the site I'd much rather just have a general email for tournaments or something.

P.S.  I never say In My Opinion because if I said it and you don't think it is my opinion than that's not really my problem.

In my opinion the site doesn't seem to be any slower.  If you think it's not my opinion, then it's your problem ..in my opinion.

Did you take many turns yesterday or last night?  The site was hauling!  I don't think I saw the little clock timmer thing at all and the chat thing was down during that time.

I was actually clocking turn times last night vs today and here are the results:

Nah, I would never do something like that, too lazy and don't care enough

noticed they are a bit slower today, or rather was having trouble loading things - had to F5 it quite a bit. i'll keep an eye and see if it continues.
I would like to continue to have the thing available, it's nice to carry on a quick convo instead of PMing...and i'd love to see the lobby actually be useful.

tom wrote:

There's one little bug / feature which I've spotted which is when switching between pages it doesn't keep you inside the same chatroom

That's on their end and not your fault right?  That's pretty annoying for something that sounds (from a non-techinical person) like a simple thing :).

RiskyBack wrote:

Did you take many turns yesterday or last night?  The site was hauling!  I don't think I saw the little clock timmer thing at all and the chat thing was down during that time.

I was actually clocking turn times last night vs today and here are the results:

Nah, I would never do something like that, too lazy and don't care enough

I released a number of other changes at the same time (board caching) which also improved the performance of the site. What I might do is move the chat function to a separate dedicated server, that way heavy chat use won't slow down gameplay at all.

things seem to be a bit quirky the last couple days. maybe moving the chat to a different server would help? i've need to hit F5 quite a bit lately when loading a board, 1 usually does it. i'll pull up the game from the 'my turn' link and i'll get everything but the player loaded. i hit F5 and things load normally (most of the time). i'm consistently seeing the 'done but with errors' caution sign at the bottom of the page, and i was having serious issues loading my dev board in 'views' (as in i couldn't get it to load properly no matter how many F5s i did).

For what it's worth, I haven't noticed performance issues (on Firefox), although I haven't been on too much.

I have noticed that the Who's Online in the Chat bar will display (0) somewhat often when that's not really the case.

Not sure what it's attributed to, but the site seems slow.