just wanted to point out that there are now chat rooms just for us! at neurotalk.
Great! Thanks doc john!

If you want to enter one of two rooms just click on the chatrooms tab at the bottom left then pick either health or social room. You can instant message someone on line by clicking on the chat now tab on the bottom right and click on the user with whom you wish to privately chat with.
bizi

the bug at the bottom left will lead you to games and more.
Does anyone know how to know if anyone is in the chat room before actually going there?
bizi

Hi, Bizi!

the status bar sent me a pop up when someone signed in, but not when somebody else did. I think if your chat status is "online" you are notified when Friends sign in.

If you click the bar where it says "Offline" it --

1. changes your status to online
2. shows you a pop up list of which of your Friends is online.


If you click "Chatrooms", the number next to each room probably includes non-friends. (It's hard to tell right now because nobody's in there!) You can see these numbers even if your status is "Offline".

Hope that helps.

Oh, and a weird thing? I briefly signed into social chat, and found a message there from you from three hours ago! I don't know if I like that... it leaving stuff around for hours after one leaves? Could be useful, I guess? Hmm. Anyway, something to keep in mind.

waves

you can still instant message private chat waves so that is good.
I could delete that message in social chat, but I wanted to say hello to those who posted after me.

bizi

I saw this thread here in my morning but didn't have time then to write.

I tested out the IM chat. I saw Waves' name pop up, and Barbo's too, when I was leaving after trying to figure it all out and got a lot of help from mrsD. I didn't try the main chat.

I think it's a wonderful idea.

Yes, Lara, this system has got lots of nice features. I was just looking at it again. The IM feature is very handy and the interface is quite rich, all around.

Bizi, as far as the history goes... it's just something that works differently from the way the public rooms were before. I can see where it can come in handy, for instance, if you need to disconnect temporarily during a conversation. When you sign in again, you can "catch up" on the last few things said.

waves

not sure how long the history is kept. I checked in earlier today and tonight my comments are gone so maybe they took that feature away?
bizi

Yeah, it looks that way. It's probably configurable. They may have decided they wanted the behavior to be more similar to how it was before. Or lots of folk may have said they didn't like it. Dunno.

Yesterday I saw a snatch of conversation in one of the rooms, posted a couple messages myself, exited and reentered, and saw that the earlier messages from my list had disappeared -- it probably only shows, say, the last 15 or 20 entries. It would make mores sense if it went by time. It doesn't make much sense for someone to see history from 3 hours ago, except for moderation purposes.

The snatch of history I saw was between Chemar and Jomar and Chemar mentioned that she could see the entire day's history. I thought it might be default setting that lets users see only a portion, and admins all, or something like that.