Chat ads?

Lame.

yep.

I will call them "chads" from now on. Fuck chads!

At least in the rest of the site, you can scroll to the content. The ads effectively eat up 20% of my content space in chat (yes, I measured the pixels.) with no way to scroll past them.

I'm going to say it again: third party provider. If there's a problem with chat I tend to blame Userplane first.

fucking terrible i say, get rid of them please

i hate them & they are annoying, please make them go away!

Yep... according to this the ads are part of the chat service provided by Userplane. So quit bitching to the staff.

No, don't stop bitching to the staff. The staff's bosses pay for it, the staff can pressure them to get rid of it. Or use the bad feature and negative feedback as a negotiating point.

I have an ad-blocking host file that prevents me from actually seeing/loading the ads. I have ads turned off for the site. It still wastes the space that could be filled with extra text for chat.

But beyond just the annoying nature of advertisements, it makes it virtually unuseable. Every time it loads a different ad it reloads the page. This steals the focus away from the user.

It's the same STUPID coding they have in the nearly useless IM interface. Though IM is slightly worse. If your fellow IMer types and hits enter, you lose focus, and have to click in the window. If they say stuff like LOL, ha or OK you will lose focus every five seconds.

Right now it's practically impossible for me to touchtype at a reasonable rate in chat. It's bad enough on the rest of the site, but FAR WORSE in Chat and worse yet in Chat's IM.

I, personally, didn't notice the ads until I saw this thread. They don't bother me. Maybe that's just me...

There's a little button in the IM window that shuts off the sound that plays when someone sends you a message.

People seem to thing that the staff can magically fix every problem that exists with chat. But they fail to realise (or simply ignore the fact) that it is NOT coded by SG. It's another service completely.

I don't use the chat, but what I gather is this: When there is no chat, people bitch; and when there is chat, people still bitch.

Quit bitching.

Hi. You must be new here.

Imagine how annoyed you'd be if every 30 seconds what you were typing stopped appearing without warning. You had to get off the keyboard and click the window. If you're a touch typist like I am, you type just by thinking the words. No conscious attempt to hit the right keys is needed by me. My brain does it automagically. I consistently have to go back, rethink what I was typing in terms of what I've already typed of it. This fucking grates on my nerves.

It may be slightly less annoying for a hunt-and-pecker, but for me it turns the clock back to 1982. My hair was parted in the middle and feathered back, I couldn't drink beer, my insulin pump was fucking HUGE and my dick was even smaller. Did I mention my PC had a 6502 8 bit processor and a TV set for a monitor?

I don't expect the staff to fix it themselves. I expect the staff to hassle the provider that they're spending our money to get the service. And maybe consider other competitive services once the contract's up.

I've told the provider why I think the service is lousy as well. Though the SG staff's opinion likely matters a great deal more to them.

This has happened to me MAYBE a dozen times and almost always occurs when chat is packed and I am running numerous other programs. I have few technical issues with the chat interface. I can't see what people are complaining about. I have little lag and it doesn't eat up my system resources. And I'm not running a fantastic machine. I feel bad for people who have problems with it but I honestly haven't seen them.

It still bothers me that people expect the tehc staff to fix them when it is clearly not their job. It's also not their job to harass other companies to fix their tech problems. That is the job of the site owners and the people who subscribe to the services. So go bug them somewhere else and stop whining that the staff isn't fixing the chat.

Personally I'd rather use the chat that exists now than go back to IRC or have no chat at all.

Thanks! You're not so shabby yourself.

poor staff! writhing helplessly against the might of the merciless CHAT-TAR X the OMNIPOTENT, SOLE PROVIDER of the WORLD'S CHAT SOFTWARE!!! in chat, nobody can hear you scream.



...not that I've used chat more than once in 3 years.

Did you read that link?

"Enable our ads and plug into the vast Userplane ad network to dramatically increase your revenue."

Ads were only enabled recently.

Did you read the subsequent link?

It's an ad to draw in advertisers.

Yes, I did.

"Userplane offers a diverse and effective landscape of advertising opportunities: text ads A B C D E, banners F G H, and because Userplane is rich Flash experience %u2013 it%u2019s the perfect environment for next-generation audio/video ads I."

It is one of the services available from Userplane. It's not a standard feature, it must be activated.

Or could be explained by the clearly advertised "free unlimited usage package" which comes with ads. It is also possible that the staff switched to the unlimited usage package to deal with the massive demand on chat. Who knows! I don't. I'm sure you don't.

I don't like ads. I also don't like Userplane.

I was soured by the flash client, but I got used to it. This ad business makes it pretty much intolerable. I know that it might not be the staff’s fault the ads suddenly appeared, but if there’s something that can be done about it, I think it’s up to them to do it.

Kind of odd…people started to see ads in the last couple of weeks, and even while some of them saw ads, I didn’t. Today is the first day I’ve seen them myself.

I didn't know that others had seen ads before, tonight is my first experience with it. I am holding out hope that there is a bug or error that has switched SG to a free account and activated the ads by accident. I'd assume that they re not using the free account and that some of my registration fee is going to pay for an ad-free chat.

The adds need to go, makes the already laggy performance worse and greatly reduces visible area. I was happy to see chat come back, now I'll wait for chat v3.