Yesterday the long awaited, and much needed, new version of our chat rooms was published. To make sure it would fulfill our needs the team at WildEarth Interactive built this new chat engine from the ground up. Not an easy task, but it now gives us a chat tailor-made for us and one we can adapt and modify as our needs develop and change.

The first priority was obviously to fix what was wrong with the old version (crashes, high CPU usage, impact on streaming, etc) and all of these have indeed been addressed and fixed. In addition to this some improvements were made to the look and feel.

Some of the improvements and (new) features that are already incorporated at launch are:

  • improved stability (It has been tested with one thousand ‘chat bots’ to see if it could handle the load and it passed this with flying colours!)
  • lower CPU usage and no impact on stream performance
  • stable user list, viewable side-by-side with chat
  • large font support for those with less than 20/20 vision (‘A’ button)
  • more colours to improve readability
  • private messaging in a separate tab
  • time code in users time zone
  • the ability to watch chat without logging in
  • the ability to post links
It also provides improved moderation tools to help better manage the chats, something which a number of our producers had asked for.

E.g. a ‘kick’ option has been added, similar to the one on Justin.TV, that allows a user who is breaking the community guidelines to be quickly, but temporarily, removed from chat without immediately having to go to a full ‘ban’.

We will of course keep developing the chat engine and will add more features and improvements as we go along. For this, as always, your feedback would be very helpful. So tell us what you think is right, wrong, or could be better at .

— Peter