I know I may be in the minority in here on this one, but the pet peeve I have always had about the chatroom still reigns true. An auto-refresh or even better a scrolling text chatroom would be MUCH nicer. I'm not suggesting a javascript text based chatroom, but a scrolling HTML chat. www.blackplanet.com had one a couple of years ago before they switched to their java-based chat and it was probably one of the best chatrooms I've been in. Whereas its not as cool when there are 125 people in the room (because the text goes faster), it takes the burden of refreshing off of the chatters' CPU. It was cool because it was easy & user friendly. I know it may seem like laziness to not want to hit "enter" or click "refresh" one extra time, but its actually more of the speed of a user's computer that is the actual burden. If someone's computer is a bit slow on the draw, it is annoying to attemt to catch up. Just a suggestion on the scrolling chat. I would say just try it for a week or even a couple of days and see. If you need CGI scripts, I'll even help you find them.

I know what you're talking about, and did extensive investigation into this. I do think those are pretty cool, but they tend to be EXTREMELY wasteful of resources on the server. I saw two systems (DreamChat and bChat, I think) that were not as wasteful, but one was commercial (forget that) and the other was well, not of the highest-quality code (I even spent some time discussing this with the author.) Anyhow, we do have auto-refresh, so you can use that. I know the "no need to refresh" systems are cool, and Java is really the way to go for that, IMO. It's very lightweight and works really nicely on "modern" browsers, but a lot of people do have trouble with it, and that's why we abandoned the old prince.org java chat.

i just left a new topic on this same suject.lol.well thats what i want 2 brother man & im with ya all the way.at least scrolling.thats why i dont chat in the org chat here with other's cause its a boreing chat format.get 1 with more feature's & quicker responce & u got me hooked