Discussion on the new Chat feature?

Hmmm...

I'm liking it, thanks for turning off the notifications (was half the traffic on the channel for a while there).

People with noisy mics (or music/video soundtracks playing) really drag the performance down, but I'd suspect only for people connected to them. I think the audio portion really works best for conversation. Something that has some sound, then stops for a while. Not anything that continuously chews the bandwidth. Note that a noisy or echoing mic would likely be just as bad as music as far as the impact on the channel. The Creative cams (which market as low as $20, BTW) tend to come with a clip-on earphone and attached mic. That'd likely be a good bit quieter than the average boom mic. Of course, don't have the mic facing your speakers.

One potential gotcha, if you go to dock someone you've already docked, rather than grey out that button (or change it to Undock on the lefthand box) it will then BLOCK them. I've accidentally blocked a person or three. I've seen people ask why they were blocked by someone (generally someone else has to ask for them was the block intended). This one will probably go away with people getting more accustomed to it.

Works well enough with three docked and one in the Selected box on the left. Dunno if it'd kill the utility to allow more people to be docked.

Minor gripe: When you IM with someone it has an ugly tendency to take the focus away (or something) whenever the other user sends to you. This forces you to click the text box you're typing in. If you're a touch-typist like me, this gets nightmarish. I'm not accustomed to struggling to type my thoughts out. I type them almost as quickly as I think them. The interface in the IM could stand to be a little more like the regular chat window.

People REALLY need to start using Groups. The main chat is almost unusable sometimes due to seven different conversations. If two people are having a more or less personal conversation about a date one of them went on while three other guys are talking broadband providers and the rest is all general chitchat and flirtation, sometimes it'd be better if some went to IM, Dating Sucks, Uber-Geeks or someplace else similar.

Early on I saw Dating Sucks getting a fair bit of usage. Generally only the PSW group gets any substatial usage. It's a group based upon a particular body type that publishes photosets, so as you'd imagine, the users probably have a better comfort level than they might in the main channel. I'd think there'd be other groups that might want to use their chat channel in this way. I'd think IBTC and SGHopefuls, perhaps. I'd guesstimate that SOMEONE out there is probably using SuicideBoys this way, but I wouldn't know.