On the bottom right corner of the site, you'll now find a live chat bar. Through this you can see other currently online PVB members and talk to them in real time. This is currently in testing state to see if and how well it works.
When you've played around with it, I'd be happy to get some feedback from you guys. :-)
The site renders and scrolls way slower for me now. It's probably because I use an outdated version of Opera, but I'd hate it if I visited this site less (due to the slowness) just because of this. When the page loads, it doesn't appear for about a second, then it appears at the lower left corner, and only then it moves to the right corner. It's annoying. Maybe it would work faster if it was part of the gray bar on the top of the site, rather than floating at the bottom of the window?
As for the actual chat, I can't comment because as I'm writing this, there is no one else online.
Same here with the slow/choppy scrolling. Page loading doesn't seem affected, though. I use the latest Opera. While my system is quite old (2.4GHz P4) many sites with much larger "floating" bars seem perfectly smooth.
I second the idea of adding it to the page header somewhere. Maybe you could have a simpler "floater" that only shows the number of online users and, when clicked, brings you to the top to use the actual chat thing.
I got to talk to HorvatM and TheForce81 and the chat worked pretty well, I must say it was a very comfortable experience being able to communicate with fellow users in such a direct way.
I tested the chat on several computers, OSes and browsers. Slow ones, fast ones, Windows, Linux, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Exploder. It was a smooth experience on all configurations.
But since many of you seem to have problems with choppy scrolling, I'll try to find a better solution.
I bet that loading times can be improved by merging and trimming down the required JavaScript and CSS files.
As for the scrolling problems, I think you guys made a good suggestion with placing the chat button in the user bar on top. The problem is that it does not allow free placement on the site, plus it can become pretty wide when several chats are open to the left of it.
What I could do: make the userbar use the full screen width, move the "PMs" and other buttons to the left and replace them with small icon-only versions. Then the live chat could use up all the space on the right.
In addition, I will set up an option to completely disable the live chat.
I am also thinking of updating our license to premium. This would cost an additional $80, but would allow us to use the lite version of the chat, which does not include all the unnecessary stuff I disabled anyway and is said to be 10 times faster. It would also be branding free.
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