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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WotC_Mel" data-source="post: 2560946" data-attributes="member: 21569">Hello, I am the person I believe many of you want to direct your discontent at.I don't believe I can address all the various complaints in a systematic matter, so allow me to more generally about how this new chat was selected, why, and the process of its implementation. I don't have expectations to change the minds of those who are dead set against it, but I would like to clear up some misconceptions.The chat software was purchased over a year ago by Wizards, at a not inconsiderable price. As you might know about software, there are frequently "enterprise" editions of software that are designed to be used by companies/more users than fanpages/individual sites, etc. And along with it is a support cost for individual attention. The reason I bring price up at all, is because companies generally allocate money to things they agree are important. So agreeing to buy the chat and then bring in help to customize its implementation for Wizards, and generally pay for the employees who have to deal with it are all positive indicators that Wizards does care about its community on top of the fact that it pays moderators to host.[As a side note, a year and a half prior to this, a custom chat client built on a MOO with .NET got as far as the business spec and initial development. However the staff here changed and the project was unfinished, though it had already logged a few hundred hours of code time.]Replacing iChat was far overdue. The tech behind it is over 6 years old. The company had been bought out by DigiChat so the little support we did have was gone. And the "black box" nature of the registration piece made it impossible to link registration to any other part of the community site. So non-intuitively people have to maintain two separate registrations. I get email from confused wanna-be chatters all the time. Not to mention you can not request a lost password from the system. It has to be reset by a live human. For about 50 per cent of users it was the same for a for a variety of commands like /describe. Finally, moderation of iChat is a nightmare. While I can't go into details because it would make snerts lives easier, suffice it to say that getting rid of snerts is a chore and a half. iChat had to go, the question was what would replace it.As with all software purchases, Technical Services makes recommendations as to what would work for them as well as meeting the needs of the "business user" (in this case Online Media--the webteam).  IRC was not a option for us as Tech Services does not feel its security issues are reasonable exposures. So the search was constrained by that. Actual business supported chat is similar to message boards software in that there are not a whole lot of choices out there for sale. Digichat and Chatblaster are two of the bigger players. And were we selecting today, maybe one of those two would be the choice. But at the time there were a number of considerations that led to TS recommendation that we go with Chatspace:a) plays well with main Wizards.com .asp based pages so that chat can be embedded in a webpageb) integrates with our boards log in so that one screen name can serve in both places. I know this is not a feature for some, but for the vast majority of community users, this is makes sense.c) can maintain separate instances of the Chatspace such that we could actually try to get a viable chat for Magic chatters going and yet not have them trod on RPG inclined folks. d) had the nice plus of being able to have the actual client skinned to match a look and feel of the chat typeThere were some others too.I should mention that prior to selecting software, I had asked in numerous quarters--on these very boards--what was the best chat system people were aware of. The only response I ever got was offers from psionics.net to host our chats for us.Once Tech Services made recommendations, I went put the software through its paces to make sure that it would keep core functionality that iChat had.  The bots could be ported over. It could host "event chats." It had all the little things like ignore users, private messaging, and yes, space for descriptions--more on that bit later. Also, About.com used Chatspace in a more visible way back then (it is fairly buried now to get to it) and they had a nice feature that I felt would drive more traffic to chat. It could display how many people were on a given area to a webpage. Such that I could say on D&D main website, "There are X people chatting in-character now. Join them?" and the X would pull out the number dynamically.Chatspace seemed to be able to do those core items reasonably well and Chatspace support agreed to customize a few unaddressed items. So it was purchased. Since then, Wizards began work on it, the primary tech was headhunted by Microsoft and left, the project was reassigned and work proceeded. Work stalled for a bit when Chatspace put out the next rev of the software and the installation broke the customization work and it had to be reapplied.Skins were created for four instances of chat (Magic and neutral "moderator skin" are the ones you have not seen). Actually applying the skins was a PITA because Chatspace's documentation for that is inaccurate and there was a lot of back and forth there.Chat bots were recoded for the new system with input from the WizOs about what the new golem menus would be.And then about six weeks ago WizOs were introduced to the system and have been getting up to speed on how to moderate with it and document issues that they saw. Some of those issues you have see first hand in open house. Open house had a few purposes. Obviously guests have a vested interest in seeing what the new chat was going to be before iChat was removed. But it was also to make sure that existing chat users were able to secure their screen name before the chat was made more generally public. And finally, there was the not small matter that there are still issues to work out and a small open house would be a reasonable way to discover what ones would affect guests the most and try and get them addressed prior to "grand opening."So Chatspace was expected to have some issues. Though certainly some of the things that are making ISRP guests happy are "just the way the software is" and not something that is broken per se some of them are items that can either be cleared up by understanding what is going on or can be asked to be fixed by Chatspace support.I have to run to a meeting now but I will spend a bit more time on this post to try and say something specific about some of the complaints. Like IP numbers are NOT viewable by other guests. You can see your own address, but not others. It should display simply as XXX.XX.XXX.XXX.-Mel</blockquote>

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