Appraisers' Free Forum

I found a tutorial on the support forum that showed me how to put a chat box on the forum. This is the freebie version; the paid version costs only about $20/year, and offers more features, of course. You may see advertisements in this free one from time to time; I don't know what form they'll take.

This free chat box allows up to 60 posts per hour, with updates every minute. The paid version updates ten times faster, and has no limits on the number of posts.

I've put this one up just to try it out and see whether we like this idea or not. To keep the visual appearance the way it should be, I'm locking the Chat Box forum to prevent replies from scrolling the shout box off the screen. You can still type into it; you just can't leave regular forum replies. Let me know what you think about this. In particular, do you want it in the forum section it's in now, or would the Portal page be better?

I can't do anything about the small font in this free version, but I can in the paid version if we decide to keep it.

Great idea! If the paid version is only 20 a year - I'll send a check.

My yahoo stuff never works right and it would be good to have a chat room. Then we could annoy eachother in real time.

I like it. It could be fun and the posts disappear after the last person leaves the chat room, right? That means Otis and Rhonda can talk dirty and nobody will know The $20 version that is paid by Rhonda is also the best idea

Chris H wrote:I like it. It could be fun and the posts disappear after the last person leaves the chat room, right? That means Otis and Rhonda can talk dirty and nobody will know The $20 version that is paid by Rhonda is also the best idea

Actually, the sins of the past can revisit you. It archives up to 5000 posts.

I've put up another one that's located on a different server, but I don't think we're going to like it. It has better visibility, is free, and is quite responsive, but it requires each user to register at xat.com. I'm a little leery of this one.

These things are posted in the main forum section just for testing purposes. I can locate the chat box on the home page, in a forum, or (I think) on its own page. The one at the top is provided by ShoutMix, the one at the bottom is from Xat.com.

The ShoutMix box is slightly crippled and slow in this demo, but should achieve good speed in the paid version. The Xat box is free, speedy, and legible, but may allow stuff we don't want to allow.

I'll run both for a while and see which one we like best. (BTW, I found out how to make the font bigger in the ShoutMix box.)

Chris H wrote:I like it. It could be fun and the posts disappear after the last person leaves the chat room, right? That means Otis and Rhonda can talk dirty and nobody will know The $20 version that is paid by Rhonda is also the best idea

Rhonda is going to pay for both of us? WOW. And here I was giving it away.

Jim, I see that they've both got advantages, although the freebie one does have a lag, as you explained. I also noticed that the one that date/time stamps appears to be GMT + 1 hour or something like that. I posted about 2:30 and it showed 8:30. The one with the emoticons doesn't have any time stamp which means we can't tell when someone posted. But I'm sure some will prefer the emoticons aspect over the time stamp.