Welcome!
Welcome to the SwallowSoft chat room!
This chat room is intended both for idle talking about anything vore related, as well as role-playing. If you're interested in either, please join in and chat. I ask that you take any off-topic chat or role-playing to another chat room, for the benefit of everyone else.
This chat room is, in spirit of this website, meant to be for everyone interested in vore. (Un )fortunately this spans a wide spectrum of extremes, but I ask you to please be tolerant and respectful of other people and their reasons for chatting here.
If you want to get a feel for what the people in the chat room are interested in, feel free to "lurk" for awhile (i.e., enter the chat room but don't actually log in), or read some of the recent log files from the chat (details below.)
Getting started
This chat room is completely HTML (web page) based, so you don't need any special tools or client software to chat. I've tried to make it as simple and widely usable as possible. If you have a computer with an internet connection and a web browser, you can chat! No cookies will be stored on your computer, and no fancy Java or Flash capabilities are needed.
The chat room works by refreshing the text of the web page you're looking at periodically; you'll notice that your browser will flash quickly and update itself with new text every few seconds. Sometimes you will need to be patient and wait for an update to happen. If it appears to be "stuck" and no updates happen for more than a minute, you may need to press the "Reload" button in your web browser to get the page to update.
Note: The instructions below assume that you chose the "default" chat layout when you logged in; if you choose one of the others, the user list, input box, and chat text may be in a different location on your screen.
To get started, you'll have to type in a login name and password (the boxes to type these in should be at the bottom of your screen.) If the login name you choose is not already in use, the chat will make a note of the name and password you chose (be sure to write down your password, and use a unique one!) If you don't choose a password, your account will be deleted when you log off. Once you have chosen your login name and password, click the "[Login!]" button and you will automatically be logged into the chat.
Once you've logged in, the login prompt at the bottom of your screen will become a text input prompt, with [ENTER] and [LOGOUT] buttons. To "talk", type some text in the field next to your name, and either press the enter key on your keyboard, or click on the [ENTER] button. After a moment, your text should appear on the screen above, with your name next to it. When you're done chatting, clicking on the [LOGOUT] button will log you off.
You will notice that the "User List" on the right side of your screen will change. The names of the other users logged in will still be there (by the way, if you click on someone's name, you will get a screen with their description, if they've entered one), but now you will see your name as well, with a "[edit]" link next to it. If you click on the [edit] link, you can edit some of the properties for your character description, colors your text will appear in, etc. You are encouraged to change your text colors once you've gotten the hang of the chat room - different colors for your text greatly improve readability of the chat text, especially when many people are using the room at the same time. Note: you have to enter your password in a field near the bottom of the edit page to make any changes.
You will also notice that the other people listed in the "User List" in the right side of your browser window have "(W)" next to them when you're logged in... this allows you to send private messages, called "whispers", to other users. When you do this, only you and the recipient can see the message sent. Your text entry window at the bottom of the screen will change when you click on the (W) next to someone's name to indicate that you are going to send a "whisper" message. Type in your "whisper" like any other text, and you will then return to a regular text input prompt. You'll also notice that whispers have a slightly different background color, to make them stand out.
Well, that's the basics... give the chat a try and enjoy :)
General usage and features
Probably the coolest feature of the chat room is that it is persistent. If you get logged off for some reason (network problem, your computer crashes, etc.), you can log back in, and your text will still be there. In other chat clients (like ICQ or IRC) your text is gone if you get disconnected and come back to the same chat room.
This chat room has some features not mentioned above to facilitate role-playing. On your character description editing screen (log in, then click the "[edit]" link next to your name on the "User List") you can choose a "Login Blurb" and a "Logout Blurb" - these are text messages that will be automatically posted, as if you typed them, when you log in and log out of the chat. If you always type the same thing when you log on/off, this can be a nice timesaver. Leave the fields blank if you don't want the blurbs to be used. Also, there's a "Silent Login" button in the chat, using this instead of the "Login!" button when you first sign on will suppress your login/logout blurbs for that session. (This is for times when you want to pop in to whisper to someone and then pop back out, without actually interrupting the rest of the chat.)
If you leave the chat room for more than a few minutes, you will be automatically logged off. Your "Logout Blurb" will not be posted when this happens - instead, you will silently dissapear from the chat room. If a user leaves the chat without using the "Logout" button (either by voluntarily going to a new web page in their web browser, or due to a network problem on their end), the chat will show a number in red between square brackets (e.g., "[2]") next to the user's name in the userlist. The value between the brackets is the approximate number of minutes remaining before the user will be kicked off the chat for being idle. Please use the "Logout" button when you leave the chat if possible; this takes your name off of the user list immediately, and people aren't confused when you don't answer them in the chat :)
You can make a description of your character as well, and make it as long as you want. What's more, you can use full HTML in your description, so you can inline an image of your character, use different fonts, link to a homepage, etc. If you don't know HTML, just type in a description for your character, and the chat will afford you some minimal text formatting.
You can also delete your character from the editor screen. You cannot un-do this! Do not click the delete button unless you REALLY mean it! Deleting a character will remove it from the chat's database, and the name will become free for anyone to use. You will be logged out of the chat momentarily after deleting your character.
If you'd like to see a list of all of the characters currently registered with the chat, check out the Character Database listings. Also, if you want to get a feel for when others are typically in the chat, there is a Statistics Page available that tracks the hourly traffic in the chat.
Up-to-date log files of the chat are available (public posts only.) The available logs record the last 250, 500, 1000 or 2500 posts. You should be able to use the "File -> Save As" function in your web browser to save out logs that you are interested in keeping.
There are four frame layouts that you can choose among before you enter the chat; these may not all appear correctly on every web browser and screen resolution, so choose the one that best sutis you (the "default" one works well on most configurations.) Most web browsers will let you resize the frames on a webpage by clicking and dragging the border of the frame to a new width/height, so you can fine-tune the chat to be the exact size, shape and layout that you like.
If you type in a URL (i.e., something like https://voraphile.com/index.html) the chat will recognize this and turn it into a hyperlink, so that other users can just click on it to open the URL in a new web browser window. The URL displayed may get spaces inserted into it if it's too long, but the hyperlink will work; if you need to save a URL that gets mangled like this, use the right mouse button in your web browser, pick "Copy Link Location", and then paste that to get the correct URL. (Why does it get mangled in the first place, you may ask The chat adds the spaces to keep the text wrapping in the chat text frame; if a string of characters is too long and without any spaces, the formatting in the main chat text window will require a horizontal scroll-bar to read, which is annoying.)
HTML tags for bold, italic and underline text are allowed in the chat. Any other tags will be disabled, in the interest of keeping the chat working smoothly (bogus HTML can cause the chat display to go haywire, even in a post.)
CLI-style commands (al-la IRC)
| Command: | Description: |
| /quit | Quits the chat, just as if you had clicked on the "Logout" button. |
| /ooc Message text... | Turns your post into an "Out Of Character" post, by sticking double parenthesis around it, e.g., "Message text..." would become "(( Message text... ))" |
| /me Message text... /pose Message text... |
Turns your post into an "pose", by sticking asterisks (*) around it, e.g., "Message text..." would become "* Message text... *" |
| /msg username Message text... /whisper username Message text... |
Sends "Message text" to the username specified, just like a whisper would if you had clicked on the (W) next to the specified username; the username is case-insensitive. Note that, if you click on the (W) next to a username first, then type out /msg in the input text field (i.e., you try to whisper inside of a whisper), the username provided after the /msg command is used. The behavior is defined this way because, if you do a /msg inside of a whisper where you clicked on the (W) next to someone's name, chances are you made a mistake and don't mean for the private message you're about to type to go to the username you clicked on first... |
Please note: any spaces before a command are ignored. More often than not, people will have a leading space when they DON'T want it, and this can be particularily embarrasing if you were trying to send a whisper to someone and it gets echoed to the chat publicly instead! Also, the commands themselves are case-insensitive.
Known bugs / annoyances
There are currently problems with some web browsers (most notably AOL's browser and Opera) that do not handle the refresh of the chat correctly; this will take the form of the chat going quiet for a few minutes, and then you finding that you've been logged out. The solution to this is to either use a web browser that works properly, or manually use the "Reload Frame" option (usually invoked with the right mouse button); reloading the whole page will cause you to be booted from the chat (unfixable limitation of this chat, sorry) but reloading just the main text or userlist frame is safe.
I have tried very hard to make this chat work with as many web browsers as possible; my own experience and feedback from users has told me the following: Netscape works without problems in this chat (however, I have not tested 6.0 and later), IE has some problems (in particular, IE 5.5), Opera has some minor problems, NetPositive has some problems (will hang after enough time), and AOL's browser is almost impossible to use with this chat.
There is a problem with the chat where the "focus" of the input text box in the bottom frame of the chat in web browsers that don't have JavaScript enabled... There is no way to type more text in without clicking on the input box if you don't have JavaScript, it's just a limitation of HTML. Luckily, most current web browsers have JavaScript.
Where to report bugs / request new features
This chat is something I am working on in my spare time, which unfrotunately I don't have much of these days. However, I'm always interested in feedback on this chat room (or any part of Voraphile.com, actually.) Please email any comments, bug reports, etc. to: [email protected] When reporting a problem, please tell me as much as you can about your system and what is happening - what time the problem happened, what your login name was, what kind of computer you're using, what operating system, and what web browser.