Quote by swcpl2005
I haven`t had any real problems since beta stopped rearing its ugly head every five minutes !!!
I`m sure everybody will tell me it was just a coincidence :roll:
But let`s see what happens when they try bringing it in again.
Personally I like the way the chatrooms work, I like the layout and i like the features. None of it is particularly confusing and, honestly, it works most of the time.
As soon as beta chat is switched on the whole place will fall apart... !!!
Go on :lol: prove me wrong :lol:

Beta chat was temporarily up and running earlier today but it's now lost the "beta" tag.
If what we saw is really the taste of things to come then it's going to annoy a lot more people than it pleases. Very little progress has been made on improving the user interface which may well appeal to an 18 year old reared on a diet of eye candy and an attention span that is measured with a stopwatch but for those with a bit more experience (or actually qualified in human factors and man/machine interfaces) it falls well short of what could be developed.
We were really hoping that SH were listening to feedback from the beta testing but some major points have been missed and the opportunity to develop a chat room worthy of such a good site has now been lost.
HI,
Could you run through some of the things with the look/style/feel that you don't like. Please ignore any features that were not working as i'll come to that in a minute.
The user interface was re-designed to reflect the current chatrooms look a lot more, very simple, clean and minimalistic approach. The layout has been optimised to fit as much on the page as possible - we have to take into consideration the users on the tiny 800x600 resolution - it just about fits perfectly, and if you have a higher resolution, will expand to any size you wish, still maximising the space avaliable.
I would be interested to know what issues you still see with the interface - as far as i was aware we listened to all the feedback previously and have come up with a in interface based on the feedback we received. I won't delude myself and expect it to please everyone, but i'm always open to suggestions, and want constructive criticisms from whoever can offer it - i want the new chatroom to be a success as much as you do.
As far as losing the 'beta' tag and the issues seen yesterday. You can test and test again in the development environment, but it will always happen, issues will be found when opening it out to the public. The beta tag was removed because as far as i was concerned, the application had been tested enough, i was happy with its performance during testing (no issues were seen that was seen yesterday), and i was happy for it to go live.
The bugs seen were minor issues that will require a small amount of time to fix, they were very superficial.
Its important to remember the primary goal of this new chat is to address reliability and performance issues - its to address the problems users have with the current chat, as mentioned in the first post - problems changing rooms/servers for instance.
When we took over the site the chatroom had very little use, the chatroom we implemented was for little use - now we regularly see 1000-2000 users a night on the servers, this is why we have had to 'bodge' together 3 separate chat servers to split the users out - its less than ideal. It gets very complicated when you talk about user numbers in triple figures, the majority streaming and publishing video, chatting and flipping rooms/servers.
As far as the original point of this thread goes, i think people need to look at it at another angle - many sites of this size will just be left alone, taking money, no further development or improvements, no resources spent on taking it to better levels - just reap as much money as possible while you can.
Luckily we're not like that and continually want to develop and improve the site and the community. Hence the copious amounts of work gone into this new chatroom - yes it has issues but it will get there.
The fact i'm sitting here on a Saturday afternoon replying to a thread while not even being paid sums it up - its because we care, not because of money.

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