A new chat room is coming!

Hi everyone,

For those of you who haven't yet come to our drop-in chat yet, you should! It's been running continuously for four years straight every Saturday from 3-4 PM EST, and is a fabulous place to discuss things with other TMSers in a more interactive format. Occasionally, people will discuss the chat here in our forums, as happened in the following thread:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/thread...he-danger-signal-of-the-pain.8476/#post-58447

Over the next several weeks, I'll be upgrading the software that runs our chat room, so you may see some changes in our forum software as well. Unfortunately, when I built the chat room four years ago, I used a software product that is no longer being updated. Simutaneously, over the same period, spammers have become more devious and technologically advanced. As a result, our chat room is being spammed by specially written programs that advertise a dating site.

Our current chat room software doesn't include state of the art spam-fighting tools, but I have identified 5 new products that are integrated with our discussion forum software and do have such tools. The new tools should allow us to block the new spammers.

At this point, I've narrowed the chat software candidates down to one leading candidate. It may be a while before I can install it, though, as I first need to upgrade MySQL, our database server, upgrade our forum software from version 1.4.10 t0 1.5.2, and rebuilt the development server before I can install and test the new integrated chat room server (whew!). Only then will I know if the new software will be truly appropriate for our needs. (I'm optimistic, though.)

The bottom line is that you may see some minor changes in the forum, and a new chat room popping up. Unlike the old chat room, it will be tightly integrated in with the forum, which will hopefully strengthen both programs as they feed off of one another.

Enjoy the site! Here's the link to the old chat room if you want to check it out:
http://www.tmswiki.org/chat/

 

Thanks for your support, @mike2014 and @Andy B. It is the wonderful community of people like you that make it all worthwhile.

 

I should also mention that the software was successfully upgraded yesterday and is ready to use on Saturday!

 

I'm glad to hear it. I won't be there myself, but I'm sure it will be great. Thanks for the kind words about the professionalism and caring. I think it's a big factor in why we have grown so rapidly. People need to know that we are worthy of their trust before they will want to join our community.