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Hello all,

While not consistent, I noticed some very high traffic spikes in the SwallowSoft chat room this week, last night in particular... we had twelve people and at least three lurkers for more than an hour! The stats page shows almost 300 posts in one hour, which is a lot more traffic than I had designed the chat to handle (300 posts/hour is an average of five posts a minute, and the chat only refreshes once or twice a minute...)

With the current setup, keeping up with the flow when there are that many chatters at once requires constant attention, or you miss stuff :/ So, I'm going to consider some changes to make the chat more usable in these high traffic situations, and as always I'm asking for your input too :) Some of the changes I can think of to alleviate the chat when traffic is high:

- Increase the thresholds for the number of posts in the history that you see, or at least increase the threshold for whispers; i.e. you can see a total of twenty public messages, and up to ten whispers on top of that (thirity posts.) This only helps when whisper traffic is very high, though.

- Separate whispers out into another frame, separate from the public messages. This clutters up the chat (on lower resolutions this will be very unweildly) and again only helps when whisper traffic is up. It also looses the position of the whisper relative to the public posts. I can try making this an alternate layout for the chat, but it'd be more work for me that way than the other ideas here...

- Allow users to configure the maximum number of posts that they can see, up to some hard limit. This has the potential to cause some real lag in the chat, though, if everyone cranks up the number of posts they see. (I picked twenty initially because it was the minimum that would fill an average browser setup.)

- Make multiple chats (which I am very reluctant to do because of server resource issues...)

- Add an "ignore" feature so that you can ignore a couple of people having a RP (but still get whispers from them) and keep your screen from scrolling away.

The idea of making the chat a front-end to a simple MUCK came up again, and if I had more time I would really consider doing it. Having a web interface to a MUD/MUCK would allow all of those who can't get on MUCKs by telnet to still play with their vore friends online, and would allow for all kinds of enhancements etc. in RP's. (And before you say "Oh how many people don't have telnet !" let me assure you that it's more than two :) ) If someone wants to mail me a fat sack of cash money so I can quit my job and work on the MUCK idea, email me for my snail mail address... :)

Speaking of load on the server, the chat is generating some really large log files and gobbling up lots of bandwith :( I will be restricting the refresh rate of the lurker's view of the chat and making some other changes in the next week (internal ones mostly, you won't see them hopefully) to try and reign things in... In the event that I get notice from my ISP to remove the chat, I'll look for a new home for it. But let's hope that doesn't happen... :/ Especially since I still want to do the story archive, and that's going to gobble up resources too...

So make your suggestions, the chat is only as much fun as it is because of all of the great ideas I've gotten from people!

-Digit ([email protected])