frwl wrote:in all honesty, this should have happened sooner. Yes, I agree that one should have, without a doubt, gotten administrative permision to create such a thing. However, with all due respect, the fears of Ashley and the other administrative forces are vastly exagerated, fears of things in the past at the most. Troth be told, CAA's feble albiet nobel attempts to form a chatroom without IRC aid have all but failed. IRC is arguably the best chatroom protocol. Only the most unlearned person in computers and the safety thereof are in any danger of being hacked or otherwise today. Verily, the "hacking" that can be done over IRC is the same that could happen over AIM or other IM programs. A person need only be foolish enough to give away personal information or download a bad file, combined with dropping firewalls and virus protection. I do say, one would have to TRY to be hacked over IRC nowadays.
Truly, if CAA wants to ever have a productive chatroom, we must turn to IRC. Appoint capable ops and mods, a censor bot if you see fit. It's not that hard. Think about it, and be your fears quenched in the knowledge that safety has improved by leaps and bounds in the past year or two.
I think it would be appreciated if you didn't patronize the mod staff as uninformed for our preferences. IRC is not as well controlled or as well controllable as you assert it is (and I use IRC regularly myself for some tech chat areas -- in fact, I'll be on a Commodore IRC channel tonight -- so it's not as if I fired up epic4 two years ago and haven't touched it since). Although the security aspect is well-improved with a good client, there is also the liability of the large amount of filesharing that goes on, something that we have never condoned here. Your opinions will differ, but calling the mod staff behind the times is subtly insulting.
Moreover, as a personal note, it was personally very frustrating while the original chat service was up to see lots of public complaints with little attempt to work through them or submit sane suggestions for improvement other than "It doesn't work" and "I don't like it." I'm not sure what oldphilosopher's opinion is with his attempt, but I was very displeased with the quality of feedback I received and a new service can only be improved with good response from its users. It took me six months of work to get most of the chat kernel running, most of which I wrote myself, and it was very exasperating to sit through bug complaints from people who frankly didn't seem to give a rat's behind.
This is not to get on your case specifically about that in particular, but I think the chat issue has been sorely beaten to death.
The long and short of it is, if people want to erect their own unofficial channel, go ahead. Ashley's point is that it is not officially sanctioned. Your mileage may vary. For that reason, we're done here, I think.