27 Sep 10 Connect Chat Upgraded

We soft launched the upgraded chat module in Connect a few weeks ago and wanted to see how it did after testing proved it was more stable than previous updates. I’m happy to report “so far, so good.”

So this is the official announcement that we think we’ve improved chat overall in Connect. Here are some reasons why:

Hopefully, the biggest improvement will be better stability, and the random problem a few users experienced getting kicked out of a chat will decrease. Since we don’t know what caused the problem in the first place, we can’t really say the upgrade will solve it, but the newer code might help overall. If you or someone in your group still experiences the problem, please let us know.
One of the really nice, new features is that you can now pop the chat session out into a new window so that you can still browse in the old window without affecting the chat. When you’re in a chat session, you’ll see a link next to your name in the middle of the screen that says “[View in popout]” specifically for this purpose.In fact, we think this might have been one of the problems related to folks getting kicked out of chats. In some instances, if a person clicked on a link in the chat or elsewhere on the page, they’d leave the page, inadvertently leaving the chat. With this new feature, you can still click around in the original browser window without leaving the chat once you’ve “popped it out” into its own window.
For accessibility purposes, we also took the time to add a new checkbox on the screen that pauses the autoscrolling in the chat window. Sometimes the text flies fast and furious, and it can be difficult to read it all before it’s gone off the screen. If this is happening to you, just check that box to pause the window, catch up on the conversation, and then un-check the box to restart the scrolling. Like curb cuts and high contrast text on web pages, this addition should help everybody, not just users with accessibility issues.
If you look at the bottom of the box where you type your text, you’ll see three short lines stacked vertically. This is an indicator that you can drag the bottom of the box downwards in order to make it bigger. If you find that you’re consistently typing a lot of content into that box and the words scroll off to the side so you can’t see the whole sentence, you can now drag that bar down to make the box bigger in order to see all of the text. Once you change the size of the box, it should stay that way until you leave the chat.
You shouldn’t run into problems with counting how many characters you can type anymore, either (hooray!). I still wouldn’t type an essay at once, though, since it makes it difficult for others to read the whole thing before it scrolls off the screen.
There are now separate buttons for archiving chats and deleting them. You no longer have to archive a chat first in order to delete it. (Reminder: archiving a chat just means it’s closed and no one can join it anymore.)