Getting the Best Chat Room Experience
Once you've logged in to our chat rooms, the first thing you'll want to do is get acquainted with the layout. Where is everything, and what does it do? Fortunately, it's pretty simple. The main chat area is the biggest part of the window. You can type your messages in the bar at the bottom. The list of all users in the current chat room is at the right. You can click peoples' names to interact with them in various ways -- private message, block, add friend, etc. It's all pretty self-explanatory.
If you want to dig deeper, you can personalize and tweak the chat software for the best chat experience for you. It all starts with the menu at the top left, represented by a "gear" icon. The "gear" icon will drop down a menu with several items: Options, Font, Logout, Support, Back to Site.
We'll start by talking about the easy ones:
- Logout: This logs you out.
- Support: This takes you to our help page.
- Back to Site: This takes you back to the home page.
Font Settings
Here, you can change your font color and apply some basic formatting.
- To change your color, just touch the color you want, and then check the "Activate Color" box.
- Check "Bold" and/or "Underline" to make your text bold or underlined.
Because this section is for changing aspects of the text that you send to the server and affects how other people will see it, text size is not covered here. Text size is a client-side option, meaning only you see changes that you make. You can use your browser's scale function to get bigger text, as well as all other chat user interface elements, but there is a text scaling option built into the chat that will affect text only. We'll cover that further down. These font settings, however, can help you to establish a unique and recognizable presence.
Options
The real meat of the chat settings is found in the Options menu. We won't go into everything, but will talk about what is commonly used.
- We've found the text size to be appropriate for most people, but some find it a bit small. If you want your text to be bigger (again, this only affects what you see, not what others see), visit the "Appearance" tab and adjust the "Message Font Scale" slider. The default is 10. 12 may be appropriate for some smaller than usual screens. Drag the slider to whatever you like.
- The "Private Messages" tab can be your best friend, especially if you're a woman facing excessive unwanted attention. You can filter out some of the flood of private messages by blocking messages based on gender; check the boxes to block private messages from men, women, and/or people of unspecified gender. You can also check the option to block messages from unregistered guest users. Finally, you can uncheck "enable private messages" so that no one who is not on your friends list can message you. Beware, however, that if you send a private message to any user, even if your private messages are disabled, that user can reply to it until you reload the chat.
- The "Sounds" tab lets you disable sound entirely, enable or disable sounds when someone says your name (a "highlight"), enable or disable sounds when receiving a private message, and enable or disable vibrations. Note: Vibrations only work if your device and web browser both support it.
- The "Theme" tab lets you cycle through preset themes that radically alter the color scheme and some elements in the chat software. Play with them and find one that you like!
There are many many more options. Exploring the various options tabs is a better way than going through an exhaustive list. Don't worry: We've designed it so that you can't really break anything.