Chat is a well programmed, well featured virtual chartroom generator. It fulfills all the needs you'd have to start a discussion of any sort, including different channels, private messaging system, custom moderation settings for channels and all the commands necessary for a chat session plus more. It has some minor flaws here and there, but hopefully they'll be gone in the next update.
Since this a chat game, there aren't many aspects to take account of so I just went forward and rated the vital ones.
Controls and Interface(9.5/10)
The controls in this game are easy to use and navigate. There is a stat panel located on the side in which multiple channels and their users are displayed along with other tabs for commands. There is really not much of a need for the commands tab since the commands' names are common and easy to learn so you can just type them out in the command bar for faster access. The channels are easy to navigate and access via this stat panel , also.
There is a pane handler in the center which has 3 different panes, one for chat output, one for settings, and another for the browser. This set up works absolutely great and is very easy to get used to.
The only slightly negative point of this aspect of the game is of the private messaging windows. When you use the Tell verb, with which you can send someone a private message, a window opens up displaying your private conversation with another user. Once closed, these windows can only be reopened by sending another message to the person mentioned. Sometimes they get in the view too.
Features (10/10)
This is the most plentiful aspect of the game and I'm sure you can't ignore it. The customization options range from name colors to the amount of time you have to go idle before the Auto-Afk kicks in and sends you down on the list of users in the channel as an AFKer while also displaying a set message which can be customized as well. You can send files, private message, roll virtual dice, show windows of text, html or code. Ignoring is easy as typing a name in and pressing enter via the commands pane. You can even make your own custom channel and invite others to join you. There are even time-zone based time-stamps, meaning that when a time-stamp is displayed, it shows the time for your time-zone, not the host's.
Community (8/10)
Even though there are more braniacs hanging around here than you could count with 3 hands and a foot, there are alot of goof-offs as well. Most of the users on can speak fluent english, spell well and use grammar in their speech. Also, just a warning to some. they are not very welcoming with people who speak the language of l33tspeak and/or cannot spell and use grammar. Oh and, alot of different things get said on here so just a short notice. On another subject, this is the number one place you should come to for programming help if you want to understand what's what. Though you should at least have some basic knowledge of DM.
Moderation and Administration (6/10)
More than a few children hang out here and many things they do hear indeed. Racial slurs, profanity, the lot. And the offenders don't even get punished! The only reason this aspect got any points is because the moderators stop spam and flaming when needed and are trustable.
Overall: 8.5/10
This game is surely one of the best and most active Chat games around these days. Drop by and join the group of chatters and maybe teach em something or two. They'd love to meet new users!
(Psst, Lummox JR also hangs out here sometimes!)
[EDIT](Thanks to Audeuro for kindly pointing out a few issues)
Yeah, I'm mostly going with GDT here. The issue of lack of moderation is that Evi strongly feels that channel problems are the job of the channel owner to prevent, and discourages us server moderators from stepping in and doing anything. If the problem is in "The Lounge" we have full permission to react, but most people don't hang out there. It's a lack of censorship issue, not a moderation issue.
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Chat is not, strictly speaking, a game. And BTW, Metamorphman, when posting a review you should not put that "Review of..." into the text itself. It's an option in the post. Use the game search and select the right hub entry. I've edited the post for you so this now shows up as a proper review.
Also guys, I'm calling bull on the no-censorship thing. That's just bad moderation. An unmoderated chat is fine for those who want it, but since everyone gravitates to one channel at a time this is something to consider. No BYOND chat has survived long with an unchecked population of trolls, so moderation matters. Evi also made the same mistake BYOND chat authors have been making since Xooxer, namely allowing muted users to get away with sending private messages within the channel where they're muted. There has to be some kind of limit, even if you just allow exceptions for people who want to receive messages from the silenced, because otherwise a "global" function like private messages supercedes anything a channel moderator has the power to do, and the trolls win. | |
Who said The Saloon was unmoderated? I regularly exercise my ability to warn, mute, and ban the various kiddies that drop by. If anyone throws out a racial slur in any kind of seriousness, they're gone. Usually it's just two regulars joking with one another, and anyone who isn't totally new to the clique knows that. For those that are new, there's usually someone hanging around to explain that fact.
The "trolls win" only if there's no other way to stop them from irritating you. Ignore was intended to provide a catch-all shut-the-Hell-up function, but tells still get through due to an oversight on Evi's part. I can't really agree with Mute stopping someone from sending tells, though, seeing as how you can only be in one room at a time with Chat. If I'm talking to someone and they get muted, I don't want to have to leave the room to continue my discussion. Plus it's a nice way for moderators to force offenders into a one-on-one discussion to resolve whatever issue they might have. That being said, Chat's full of bugs. Someone can cause a major lag spike everytime someone connects, and all but restrict dial-up users access. Ignore only partially works. The moderator verbs are sloppily coded. It's a great place because of the community and because of what Evi made it into, but it still needs a lot of polish. | |
Evre wrote:
The "trolls win" only if there's no other way to stop them from irritating you. Ignore was intended to provide a catch-all shut-the-Hell-up function, but tells still get through due to an oversight on Evi's part. I can't really agree with Mute stopping someone from sending tells, though, seeing as how you can only be in one room at a time with Chat. If I'm talking to someone and they get muted, I don't want to have to leave the room to continue my discussion. Plus it's a nice way for moderators to force offenders into a one-on-one discussion to resolve whatever issue they might have. This is the mistaken belief that has dogged all (released) BYOND chats to date. Ignore is a band-aid, not something you should always have to remember to apply if you want to make sure Cussy McCusserson doesn't bug you in a /tell--more so if you're the op who gagged him. Obviously there's a legitimate use for keeping /tell around for gagged users who are carrying on conversations with those still in the room--but that should be the thing that users need to remember, not the ignore. You should have to opt in to converse with a gagged user, or else the troll still wins. As spammers proved, opt out doesn't work. This is a design flaw, but with good intentions behind it; it is also fixable. Meanwhile if /tell can still get through an ignore, that's a pretty serious bug. It means even the shameful opt-out approach doesn't work. | |
Yeah, that is a bad bug in my book, but I think having /ignore blocking tells works fine.
Imagine an active chat environment like Chatters was, where there might be 3 or 4 channels active at a time. /tell is there to allow users to communicate through channels as well. In that case it seems a little silly to allow a mute in a channel stop a user from telling other users. An opt-in method would work OK, but it's kinda annoying to have to build up a safe list. Sometimes I just want to /tell someone something real quick, no need for them to go through the hassle of adding me to their safe list just so I can tell them my cat is on fire. It's just not functional. | |
Wouldn't it be simpler just to give each user an ignore function that lets them block whomever they choose, regardless of whether its chat or tell? That way no one is required to wait on a mod to silence someone who's annoying them.
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If there's someone you know you want to chat with who's muted, it's not hard at all to opt in to hear what they send you in a private message. The alternative is that the troll gets a free pass at every single person who doesn't think to ignore them the instant they get gagged. The latter is clearly bad design, and BYOND chats have suffered for it. In the case of a user being gagged, there's usually a good reason; so people who still want to talk to them are the exception, not the rule.
Using /ignore to block trolls hasn't been working fine; it has become a practically mandatory second step in dealing with problem users. And if it boils down to personal convenience, who do you want to make things easier for: the guy who still wants to talk to the troll, or the guy who doesn't want to be bothered by them? There's a clear right answer here, and Xooxer picked the wrong one. His bad design choice (one of many, to be honest) has literally grandfathered a whole boatload of badly designed chats. | |
My feeling is that if someone is so much of a hassle that a mute isn't enough for them, a ban works just fine. If someone is trolling a lot, I'll just ban them from Chat completely, solving the problem for everyone.
In a one room system, muting should mute /tells as well, it's perfectly logical, but in a multi-room system, it just doesn't work. Should someone muted in The Saloon be able to tell someone in The Lounge? I guess if someone was muted in The Saloon, than not being able to /tell anyone else in The Saloon would work, but it wouldn't stop a spammer from spamming multiple channels, especially if the channel owner didn't know it was happening. I guess I am thinking more in the context of several channels going at once, as to where you are basically talking about the current system, where one room alone is active. On a side note, I've never been /tell spammed, but perhaps that is because I'm a server OP. | |
Lummox JR wrote:
BTW, Metamorphman, when posting a review you should not put that "Review of..." into the text itself. It's an option in the post. Use the game search and select the right hub entry. I've edited the post for you so this now shows up as a proper review.I already knew that, and I was pretty sure I even selected Chat from the list. Who knows, I might have forgotten and refreshed maybe. Thanks for pointing that out Lummox. | |
Obviously muting someone in the Saloon should not affect the Lounge, unless the mute is server-wide. That's just common sense. But if someone muted in the Saloon tries to send a message to someone else in there, there's no reason it should get through unless the recipient has explicitly opted to hear them. Otherwise rooms become a handy jurisdictional line for trolls to cross yet still make "border raids". And if they stay in the same room, it's most likely because you're dealing with a chat that is effectively one-room anyway (as most ultimately are). Ultimately most multi-room chats that make this bad /tell choice do so because they assume multi-room will get real use; so they trade off the good points of a single-room chat without shoring up security issues, while getting essentially no benefit in exchange.
But even if you get significant multi-room usage, you've still got the fact that /tell tunnels right through a mute; the myth of channel sovereignty is destroyed because there are easy-access "global" commands to get through each channel's security. If I'm an op in a room, I want the troll I gagged to stay frickin' shut-up, and I don't want the idiot spamming me with requests to ungag him. I shouldn't have to manually ignore everyone I gag to effect that. If another guest chooses to listen to the guy, that's entirely his own business and it should be on his shoulders to deal with it. | |
Good point, Lummox, but I still prefer to think that the ignore method is better. I don't think you are wrong, but my opinion differs. I actually tried a one room chat and nobody was happy with it. I personally feel BYOND would work just fine with one room, but nobody seemed to agree, at least not audibly(although the "Vote with your feet" saying does apply in this case).
With a one room/channel system, it makes perfect since for a mute to be global across all commands, but I feel anyone who deserves a mute deserves a boot as well. Timed boots normally work far better than any mute to solve the problem of trolls. I guess timed boots don't apply to a multi-room system either, though. As a boot from a multi-room chat should be only because they are harming the system itself, which is a perma-ban in my book. I think that BYOND chat environments should just give up on the whole multi-room concept and just go single. It's what people do anyways, and it solves most of these problems. | |
I say just build MUDs instead and let players kill the trolls.
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Maybe we can kidnap Lexy at gunpoint and force her to finish Endless Lands before she gets back to her writing. (Who am I kidding? No one in the Casual guild has the motivation to do that. ;-))
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Multi-room chats never seem to be used as such, but people seem to want them. The thing is though, security can't be compromised for it.
But screw opinion; with all due respect, DB, you're just plain wrong. In an opt-in vs. opt-out debate there are sometimes pros and cons to each, but those cases are rare; usually one is far superior. Like with spam: Clearly opt-out solutions are wrong; opt-in is the only way that would ever work. When a user is gagged it's partly because nobody wants to hear them; if someone thinks otherwise, they are the exception. Therefore opting in is the way to go. If you had a room with an op who muted someone that everyone wanted to listen to, they'd all just switch to a different room--which is why that situation doesn't come up much in the first place. That said, the only real debate is between opt-in or all-out. There's something to be said for totally blocking a gagged user's messages in a room, period--namely that their buddy who stays behind doesn't easily get to pass along everything they say. This is not a bad design; its flaws are few. Opt-in is not a bad design. Opt-out is a terrible design; it is widely and almost automatically abused. The sheer degree of that abuse is the telltale that it was the wrong decision. | |
Athrun Uchiha wrote:
This thing sucks they get piss cause having anime names its stuiped things don't play this too many idiot GMs and of course retards. Evre just a noob who can't handle little words cause of the emo, best for everyone not to play cause of that noob. Since I knew she got all made tried to log in on other account to say sorry but mutes me without warning and didn't say a word. PS Looking for Iconing / Coding/ Mapping Job I'm a Expert Worked on it for 3 years now. Pm Me On Key I'll show you some of my work and info. | |
You're just sore because you got muted in the Saloon, which has nothing to do with Chat. If you had gone anywhere else, you would've been able to talk. Evre was not a global OP; she was merely a room OP.
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In NChat if you mute someone in a room they can't send a whisper to anyone currently located in that room, but they can freely send them to people in other rooms they're in.
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Nadrew wrote:
In NChat if you mute someone in a room they can't send a whisper to anyone currently located in that room, but they can freely send them to people in other rooms they're in. So in NChat the whispers aren't handled globally? Like you only see a whisper in the specific window of the room it is sent from? That doesn't sound very global thinking, at least not global thinking like allowing people to be in multiple rooms at once. Lummox: I still disagree with you. Call me wrong if you will, and possible naive at people's intentions, but I feel like a mute is for the room, and when you stop thinking of people as belonging to the room, and start thinking of them belonging to Chat as a whole, the actions of a channel operator should not affect individuals, even if they are in the OP's channel. I know the possible spam avenues. I know sometimes idiots like to relay messages. And I know people are annoying. I still think I would prefer my way over yours. Perhaps if I would have ever had an issue with it I would think different. But I haven't, so I don't. When I originally created "B-Net"(My 3rd generation chat environment) it was a one room system. The person running the server enjoyed all the configuration options that a channel operator enjoys in Chat, only complete control over the server. People hated it. Part of the design included a mute like you suggest. If you were muted in the server, you couldn't do anything that would put output onto other's screens, except for log in and out(and that wouldn't even happen if they had you on ignore). It was the ultimate gag, but people didn't like the idea of a one room server, so it died. | |
i call it lack of censorship