The new Stormtrack Chat Room

[Tim Vasquez]

As some of you may know, we implemented a Stormtrack chat room experimentally starting on July 12, and it appears to be working quite well. At this point it's now considered a permanent part of the website.

I noticed that it was set to boot inactive people off after 2 minutes, which is certainly kind of ridiculous, so I have increased this to 120 minutes. Feel free to open another window and lurk while you do other things.

If you have any problems or questions, just let me know.

Tim

 

[fplowman]

Hey Tim,

I get this error when attempting to access chat. It has always been this way. I just assumed it wasnt configured yet. Any ideas?

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://www.stormtrack.org/forum/chat/
Line Number 227, Column 340:


return text.replace(arguments.callee.regExp,this.decodeSpecialCharsCallback);},decodeSpecialCharsCallback:function(str){switch(str){case '&amp;':return '&';case '&lt;':return '<';case '&gt;':return '>';case ''':return '\'';case '&quot;':return '"';default:return str;}},inArray:function(haystack,needle){var i=haystack.length;while(i--){if(haystack===needle){return true;}}

 

[Karla Dorman]

Only problem I have with the chat, Tim, is the Chat Bot - seems to knock me off frequently. What's up with that? Is my firewall to blame or what? Thank you in advance for addressing my question - appreciate it.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

the Chat Bot - seems to knock me off frequently. What's up with that?

The chatroom was set to disconnect people after 2 minutes of inactivity. This has been changed to 120 minutes.

Tim

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Fred, try Internet Explorer. I assume you get that in Firefox like I get it in Firefox. IE opens it fine. Not sure what happened to Firefox lately but some things don't work anymore. Like viewing singe hour forecast soundings on Earl's site no longer works, so I have to go to IE if I want to see those.

 

[Darren Addy]

Latest versions of FF have broken something. (Or maybe it is an extension that I have enabled? Haven't had time to diagnose it.) Even have problems with Gmail loading all the way in FF now.

 

[D. Hayes]

Matt, I'm not quite sure where that fits in with the current thread discussion.

Now it would be cool if we had some sort of scheduled event to use the chat system for. Perhaps even a webcast to add on to the chat during such events. Talk about weather forecasting, minor spotter tips, equipment, all things stormtrack!

I was a member of a online remote control telescope website (slooh.com)and nightly they held webcast answering questions during chat which made the site a blast to be a part of. Even having a skype conference with special guest. I know probably more than you want to tackle but seeing that you Tim are the expert I think you could handle this pretty easily.

An

 

[fplowman]

Fred, try Internet Explorer. I assume you get that in Firefox like I get it in Firefox. IE opens it fine. Not sure what happened to Firefox lately but some things don't work anymore. Like viewing singe hour forecast soundings on Earl's site no longer works, so I have to go to IE if I want to see those.

Thanks Mike. Appreciate the help.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

nightly they held webcast answering questions during chat which made the site a blast to be a part of. Even having a skype conference with special guest.

Yes, that's definitely the direction we're heading in. We used to do this regularly back in 2002 with the old Stormtrack IRC chatroom. My idea is that around September we can start bringing in special expert guests regularly and have some sort of moderated chat. Guests who are not ST members would be allowed to view the chat session and take advantage of whatever educational benefit it provides. But of course before we do this we want to let the chat room get a workout over the next month or so and make sure it's proving to be solid and dependable.

Tim

 

[Jacob Ferden]

Also (and please ignore me if this sounds ridiculous), I think the chat room could provide a very useful service next spring as a supplement to the target area threads. In addition to the more formal posts, members could quickly exchange information, thoughts on potential setups, and quickly relay nowcasts and other real time information.

 

[Matt Gingery]

Unfortunately, I did not quite understand what this thread was. I was under the impression that it was a general chat thread. I didn't realize that you were trying to discuss having a chat room. I apologize, but I have an idea. . .

We all know how twitter is set up. I don't know if Twitter can be incorporated into the site. We have twitter on one of our chase site with the chat box placed convieniently at the top of the page. If this is being used for general discussion then a different format would be needed. But Twitter is great for real time chase reports and discussions during the chase. May have to change the name of the thread to eliminate any confusion in the future. It is listed as "Stormtrack Chat". A bit misleading. . .

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Good point, Matt, I'll tweak it.

Not sure about the Twitter idea, partly because it will fragment all the expertise we have concentrated in the Target Area forums, but but we're open to ideas.

Tim