Forums » Smalltalk » Oh hai. I'm going to test the forum chat thing.

On my iPad, I can touch a post and it shows the date and time at the top of the page.

Whoa, iPad supports hover functions? I would not have predicted that.

Apple is clearly packed to the gills with smart people.

I was surprised too

I approve heartily. So far it sounds like the only issue iPad (and maybe iPhone?) has is scrolling back up.

I wonder if I can put in a faux scrollbar that works by tapping, that only displays for phone users.

Not this second though, I need a break from this thing.

That might work but yes, you do need a break

Kim, you should implement a sidebar in the chat that shows who's currently in the thread chat.

Yeah, I've been considering the best way to implement that code-wise. Figuring out who is looking at a bit of a website is an inexact science. Possibly more of an art than a science.

Luckily the chat gives us way more opportunities for it.

Try giving everyone here a unique tag of some sort. Whenever that tag is registered as being in a chat, it is displayed in the sidebar as that user's username.

Actually, the hard issue is a privacy one.

I can tell which users are pinging the chat on a regular basis, requesting new posts from the server, but what of the case where some people are RPing together with anonymous characters? There's very few ways for me to tell if the person in the chat is actually representing themselves as a character, and it'd be pretty easy to figure out an anonymous character if a certain player was always in the chat when they were.

Give the characters their own tags, as well!!

All of you already have several unique tags that I use to identify you around the site, that's not a problem.

So do your characters!

Well, how about a special one that can only be identified by the chat.

How would that help?

Have a tag format unique to the chat system. This tag is only visible to the chat system, and when it enters into the system, it is recorded and displayed.

Well, the user that shares that tag's username and icon is displayed, I mean.

Oh well, that's my two cents.

There's no need for a tag unique to the chat. I can already record your normal IDs when you enter into the chat.

The tricky bit is figuring out when someone closes the chat window. I'd basically just have to guess based on inactivity.

None of this solves the privacy problems for anonymous characters, though.

I've not a clue, then. I honestly tried to help, though.