Wanna be a beta tester?

First problem - it doesn't scroll when new messages are posted - it keeps going back to the start.

I would uggest that the most recent messages be displayed at the top of the page and not at the bottom. Seems to be the easiest way of solving this problem. Also, I find it more comfortable to read at that top than the bottom of my screen.

see my messages Nic?

noted the scroll issue, as well as cannot hit return key to send a message (must click on button) also no user details available when right clicking on users in chat room, be nice to have a counter of how long they been in the room, a pm feature (ok mebbe save that for a future version! and a link to the users profile, email addy would be handy)

:)

Nic, I've just tried copying and pasting a message I had written offline in Wordpad into the message window of the chatroom and sending it (in an attempt to work around the frequent refreshing) but after I clicked on "send" I got the following error message:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e57'

String or binary data would be truncated.

/chatentry.asp, line 36

I hope that info is of some use to you.

Original content deleted by Fingers.

Nic, I've done a bit more testing and a bit more thinking and here's what I've come up with. I realise that you have designed it so that each message appears below the last because that's how English is written and read and that you have programmed it so it scrolls to the bottom so people can read the most recent messages. However, there seem to be two main problems:

1: the messages that users are posting are currently appearing near the top of the screen but if there are a lot of messages the software scrolls to the bottom of the screen, forcing users who have just entered the chat room to scroll back up to the top to read from the start.

2: there are usually a lot of messages on the screen because the software has generated a lot of "X has entered the chat" messages, most of which appear more than once and from which you can't tell whether they were posted before or after the messages that users have posted (and therefore you can't tell whether to read upwards or downwards or from the top or the bottom which was my problem).

If you removed the part of the software that posted the "X has entered the chat" messages leaving only the messages that users post the screen would only start scrolling to the bottom once there were more than enough messages to fill the screen. Furthermore, once the screen had filled up and was scrolling downwards users would only have to scroll back up if they had just entered the chat room or wanted to re-read old messages. Therefore, I suggest that you remove the automatic "X has entered the chat" facility (and advise users entering the chat room to announce their arrival by posting something like "Good morning") but leave the scrolling as it is for the moment and see how that works.

I hope that is of some use to you.

I'm sure you're right, Nic. I was in the chatroom and there seemed to be a lot of other people in it too but no one was posting. I thought they may not be posting because the auto-refresh was blanking anything they typed before they sent it (I've not used any other chat rooms but I had a similar problem with a complaints form on a website). I wrote a message in Wordpad to cut and paste into the message window and send in seconds asking them to do the same just to test it out but I didn't know there was a word limit.

Here is a very popular if somewhat crazy chatroom which might be an appropriate "model".

http://www.Morrissey-solo.com/cgi/chat.cgi

Originally posted by Johnny Giles Don't think I've quite mastered this. Loads of messages telling me so & so has 'entered the chat...' but no chat anywhere. Are we all just looking at a list of whos entered the chat but no chat?If that's the case, we can't enter something that's not there, can we? It's probably me being stoopid.

that's all i got - a list of names and the message i wrote. so you're not stoopid on your own :stupid: