Hosting Your Own Chats
Do you need a way to host a chat so you can get together with others? Maybe you have a group of role-players that want to play out some scenes in a live rp session. Or maybe you want to talk about how to approach issues in an on-going storyline, or just BS and brainstorm.
Sure, there are chat options with most instant messenger clients such as AIM and Yahoo! And there are even programs like Pidgin that let you access multiple accounts at the same time, but it can still be tough to get everyone on the same page. Not everyone has the ability to set up their own FlashChat (our current favorite private hosted chat program), and most the javascript or php based chats are just… well… not worth the effort.
Enter ChatMaker.net - just go to the site, enter a room name and click GO. Then, email or IM the link to the page to your friends and they can come join you. You can change your ‘nick’ once you enter to be what you want, use the /me action command, and even do limited formatting with HTML tags. All in all, it’s a simple, but pretty decent set up. You can even break it out as a separate pop-up window if you want, or leave it in the main browser.
A few things to be aware of (I’ll leave it up to you to decide how they rank as disadvantages or advantages), the rooms are NOT private, though I’ve heard they are working on that. So if you create a common room name, someone could wander in on your conversations. Also, it does seem to hold a back-log of the conversation, even after the room has emptied. Someone could come in that same room name and see what was discussed. I haven’t had a chance to test how long and how much it saves. And since you don’t need to register, and instead can change your nickname at any time, it could get confusing if two people want to use the same name.
But overall, for an easy to use, always there when you need it chat option, this is a site worth bookmarking.
