Ok, from what I know, writting chat room programs in Java is very very simple. A friend of mine put a simple one together with about 20 lines of code (minus the GUI code). I think it is possible for a chatterbox to be written in Java and run as an applet in TWW. I would be willing to contribute to this project if asked to. Of course, I might be very wrong about this, or even more likely, crazyJ already knows about this and just doesnt care to do it that way.

5/13/2002 2:26:50 AM

5/13/2002 7:20:08 AM

Yeah, I'd love to have to wait for about 30 seconds while my browser loads up the Java VM and initializes the applet. And since TWW doesn't work with frames, this would occur on every page that you look at on TWW. Not a good idea.

Good trying though. Seriously.

-bigginal

5/13/2002 9:32:25 PM

Its a gray box with text and a button and no pictures. It wont take 30 seconds to load.

5/13/2002 10:13:10 PM

they need to just have a damn separate window for a chat area, or a dedicated page to chatting, like was tried last year.

5/14/2002 12:16:34 AM

if its not part of the normal pages, nobody will use it

5/14/2002 6:11:14 AM

why not make the entire top white strip w/ The Wolf Web and the banner/chatterbox a seperate frame.. so if the chatter box was a java applet it wouldnt have to reload w/ all the other mess. it wouldnt even look different

5/18/2002 7:05:13 PM

I :heart: frames!!

5/19/2002 1:58:51 AM

you wouldn't really notice in this case cee-jay.

5/19/2002 6:47:09 PM

But frames would do what needs to be done to implement a Java-based solution. My only concern is that if frames are used, then we run into problems if somebody uses a link to point off-site and they forget to add a TARGET="_new" parameter to the anchor tag. We'd then be pointing to other sites and still have the TWW top frame at the top of the browser. That's what gave frames such a bad wrap to begin with.

-bigginal

5/19/2002 9:02:55 PM

Oh yeah, another nice thing about frames is that it would keep the toolbar at the top of the window, all the time. (The "toolbar" being the red bar with all the links on it...I just don't have a better word for it right now.)

On the other hand, we would have a nice feature go away with the inclusion of frames on the top of the page. When Jake started this site and integrated private mail into it, he did it very smartly. Each new page that the user loads also checks to see if the user has new mail waiting in their inbox. When we use frames to get around reloading the Java client with every page, then we lose that same functionality for the "new mail" function. The only way I see to get around that would to put a meta refresh tag in to refresh the page every so often. I'd probably set it to five or ten minutes, but whatever value would probably work.

-bigginal

5/19/2002 9:08:19 PM

I think that the chatterbox is fine the way it is.. all this talk of frames etc just make it that much more complicated... why fix something that ain't broke?

5/19/2002 10:45:07 PM

I agree, but I'm just trying to throw out ideas based upon the original topic in the thread.

-bigginal

5/19/2002 10:51:23 PM

the chatterbox is not intended to replace or provide real time chat. it is a simple in-your-face way to communicate simple messages. using it to chat back and forth is just silly. obviously it sucks for that.

if we ever did implement a chat we would still keep the chatterbox. it serves its purpose if used correctly.

5/19/2002 11:09:26 PM

how about this----move the chatter box to the center and keep the banner ads on the right----and for non premium have just a permanent sign up for premium instead of chatterbox or something---cuz the banner ads are hilarious and i can't see em unless i disable cookies and what not

just an idea

5/20/2002 2:51:23 PM

or you could click the advertise link

5/20/2002 5:33:13 PM

well there we go----my problem solved---thanks

5/20/2002 6:03:24 PM