Frequently Asked Questions

Chatzy is a free private chat service which you can use to communicate with people you already know or people who visits your blog or website. With Chatzy you can create a chatroom and send out email invitations very quickly and easily. No registration is required.

Probably because you didn't invite anybody. The purpose of Chatzy is to provide you with private chat rooms in which you can chat with friends and family on the Internet without being disturbed. Nobody can join the chat if they have not been invited by you or one of the other participants.

If you didn't bookmark the chat room (as we asked you to), you may have a problem. However, most browsers "remember" where you have been, so the necessary address may pop up if you start typing "www.chatzy.com". Otherwise, try looking in the browser's history. The address should look like:

• http://www.chatzy.com/1234567890  (where 1234567890 is a unique ID number for the chat room)

If none of this works, you can easily create a new chat room.

Chatzy is an experiment by a couple of Internet professionals, with various full-time occupations. For the moment, there is no formalized company behind Chatzy.

It is costly to run a quality chat service and taking the time we spend on the site into account, we are far from profitable. Consequently, we reserve a space in the chat rooms for a single banner ad which changes every two minutes and we offer a few extra paid features (see "Subscriptions" section below).

The most important characteristics are:

• The Quick Chat allows you to create a chat room and send out invitations, as quickly and easily as you would create a regular email. You cannot, however, specify room passwords or change the chat properties (such as the title/subject) after it starts.
• The Virtual Room gives you many more options. You can set permissions by email address, choose what features the users have access to, and define passwords and a custom welcome message. And, importantly, you can change all properties (such as the title/subject) at any time after the chat starts.

You can choose between various types of user interfaces for the Virtual Room. The main types are chat and messaging. By default, both are allowed.

• In messaging mode, users enter and leave the room silently and the input box is intended for writing longer paragraphs rather than short sentences.
• Messaging mode may be one-to-many (only administrators can write, regular users can only read) or many-to-one (regular users can write, but they cannot read other people's messages). Administrators can always read everything and use messaging mode.
• In chat mode, users may or may not have to join automatically when they enter the room (leaving a text message that they entered the room). Administrators are never forced to join automatically (in order for them to monitor chatrooms silently).

In the "Allow to enter" dropdown box under Room Properties, you can choose three ways to authenticate users in your Virtual Room:

• You can allow all users who know the particular chatroom address (e.g. chatzy.com/123456789012). You will NOT be able to ban individual users with this option.
• You can allow only users whose email address has been confirmed by Chatzy (registered users). It doesn't matter if the users have been invited or not.
• You can allow only registered users who have received an email invitation for the room or been added manually to the visitor list (or who know the admin password).

Notice that you cannot define a room password with the last option, because there is no need for it - you must specifically invite all users for the room (and you can always ban a user who was previously invited).

No. The chatrooms are always open, regardless of whether the creator is present or not.

You are welcome to create a chat room and link to it from a Web page of your own. Think of it as a free hosted chat solution for your Web site. You simply use the chat room address from your browser. It should look like this:

• http://www.chatzy.com/1234567890  (where 1234567890 is a unique ID number for the chat room)

If you do this, we strongly recommend that you create a Virtual Room. The Quick Chat is primarily intended for private chats with trusted participants. In a Virtual Room, only you or somebody with the administrator password can clear the chat history, and you have the option of specifying a room password for accessing the chatroom.

Yes. Chatzy used to be primarily a real-time chat system, but we have extended its features so that it can now perfectly well be used as a blog or message board. Make sure to create a Virtual Room for this purpose, though.

A chatroom which is used regularly will stay open indefinitely. In order to save space on our system, chat rooms that have not been modified (written to) within 14 days may be deleted. This should not be a problem, since you can always just create a new chat room when you need to chat again.

Premium Rooms (our paid subscription) will be kept open for a minimum of 6 months, from the time they were last used. If they are modified regularly, they will stay open indefinitely.

You cannot remove a chat room in itself. But you can clear the entire chat history (select "Clear Chat" on the menu) so nobody can see what was written previously. Also, chat rooms not used for a period of time will be deleted automatically (see below).

Quick Chats are meant to be quickly created, used for a chat or two and then discarded, but if a specific Quick Chat address has become established among you and your friends, you may want it to have Virtual Room features.

If you pay to make the Quick Chat a Premium Room, it gets automatically converted to a Virtual Room with access control, custom URLs and all the other options. Of course, the room also gets all the premium features such as custom URL, timeout settings, etc.

The room administrator password is automatically set to the item number from the payment (make a note of it when you pay or look it up in your receipt email - it is a 12-digit number, but not the same as the room address number). With this, you can enter the room as administrator, register your email as the room owner email and change the admin password to something you can remember.

Please notice that we are not able to decide who is the most legitimate administrator of a Quick Chat. Anybody (who knows the room address) can "take control" of a Quick Chat by making it a Premium Room.

It is very simple. Go to the front page, enter your name, one or more email addresses to send the invitation to and a subject for the chat. We will then send out an email invitation immediately. You can also send out invitations directly from a chat room by clicking on "invite people" on top of the page and filling out the form that appears.

When you enter an email address, we send out an email invitation containing your message and a short footer (explaining some details, but containing no ads whatsoever). Email addresses are never used for any other purpose, as outlined in our strict Privacy Policy. If you want to see how an invitation looks like, you can always enter your own email address on the invitation (separate multiple email addresses with commas).

No. The chatrooms are open at all times. The invitations are just a means of communicating the chat room address, which is needed in order to enter the chatroom. The recipients can save the address and access the chatroom at any time.

There are several possibilities:

• First of all, please double-check the address. You would be surprised how many of our users are sending email invitations to non-existent addresses like johndoe@yaho.com (instead of yahoo.com). Unfortunately, our system is not capable of telling you whether the email reached its recipient or not.
• Online email services (such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail), as well as many email programs (such as Microsoft Outlook) have spam filters. Although it should not happen, some of Chatzy's invitations may be detected as spam and end up in a bulk/spam folder. Please ask your recipient to check whether this is the case. There is usually an option to report to the email service/program that the invitations are not spam.
• Another possible explanation is that you are sending email invitations to a mailbox, which require that senders be registered for some kind of membership. Yahoo! Groups, for instance, has this requirement. You may be registered and perfectly able to send email yourself, but if Chatzy is not part of the group, our email invitations will be returned and never read by their recipients.

In a Quick Chat, you cannot "uninvite" people (but you can always start a new chat and make sure not to invite the unwanted person). In a Virtual Room, you can either change the password or exclude the user in the visitor list by clicking on the icon in the right side of the row.

Chatzy was designed to work without the users needing to sign up. We do, however, offer some advantages to the users that confirm their email address:

• As a registered user, you automatically keep a "My Rooms" list where all rooms you enter, create or get invited to are automatically saved.
• In each room on your "My Rooms" list, preferences such as name and color are saved for next time you return to the room.
• You can set invitation permissions, e.g. you can specify that nobody or only registered users may send you invitations.
• You can enter into rooms where the owner only allows users with a confirmed email to enter.

Signing up is, of course, free and only takes a minute.

When you are logged into Chatzy with your email address, it can be used to identify you towards room administrators in certain cases:

• In Quick Chats, there is no room administrator and, consequently, nobody can see your email.
• In Virtual Rooms, only the room administrator can see it. Your email is hidden for all other users.

First of all, click "My Rooms" and remove all items from your personal room list by clicking the X to the right of each room.

Then, click "My Account", select the "Allow nobody to send me invitations" option and deselect the "Send me warnings and major news about Chatzy" box. You may even want to change your personal password to some random string if you are sure you are not coming back.

That's it! Technically, we will still have a file with your email address, but you will never hear from us again. In fact, if we deleted your email address, we would not be able to prevent people from sending you new invitations from the chat rooms.

Finally, any rooms you may have entered will still have you on the visitor list, but please notice that it is only the room administrator that can see your email address.

When you have been inactivity in a room for a period of time, you are asked to confirm that you are still following it. If you don't respond within a certain time, you will be logged out automatically. This saves free spots and system resources for more active users.

In a Premium Room, the timeout values is set by the administrator. In a free room, the timeout depends on the number of visitors in the room:

• 60 minutes if there are 6 or fewer visitors in the room
• 50, 40, 30 or 20 minutes, respectively, if there are 7, 8, 9 or 10 visitors
• 15 minutes if people are waiting in line to enter the room (more than 10 visitors).

The timeout is no longer connected to whether you are in chat mode or whether alerts are turned on or not.

Saving the chat room can mean two different things:

• To save the whole chat room history for your records, just click "Save Chat" on top of the screen. This will open up a new window which you can easily save on your computer by choosing "Save As..." in your browser's File menu (if you use Internet Explorer). (The saved page will also contain a link to the chat room through which you can access the live chat later.)
• To save a link to the live chat room so you can continue the chat at a later time, right-click on the chat room name (just below the Chatzy logo) and choose "Add to Favorites" on the menu that appears (Internet Explorer). If you need to copy the address manually, it should look like this: http://www.chatzy.com/1234567890, where 1234567890 is a number which uniquely identifies the chat room.

We admit that Chatzy is a tad boring compared to instant messaging programs. The idea with Chatzy, however, was never to offer fancy features or state-of-the-art performance, but a simple chat system which works everywhere and which everyone can use. The more features you add on, the more complex the system gets and the higher the risk of it not working becomes.

Currently, Chatzy does not support Web cams. We are considering whether or not we should include this feature in a future version.

This behavior has nothing to do with Chatzy - it is a feature of your Web browser (e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer).

Fortunately, it is easy to disable. Simply find this checkbox and uncheck it:

• In Internet Explorer: Tools menu => Internet Options (last menu item) => Content (tab) => AutoComplete (button) => Use AutoComplete for Forms (checkbox)
• In Mozilla Firefox: Tools menu => Options (last menu item) => Privacy (tab) => Remember what I enter in forms and the search bar (checkbox)

A very small number of our users don't know how to behave. They copy/paste large chunks of random text (such as "qweqwe qweqwe qweqwe" etc.) into the rooms they are visiting just to annoy people. To prevent this, we have implemented an anti-spam filter which limits the amount of text that can come from a single IP address (a computer address) within a five-minute interval.

This limit will not be reached by simply typing very fast. If you get a spam message from the system, chances are that you have been copying precomposed chunks of text into the room. This is of course OK if the text is relevant for the room. Since our system cannot distinguish relevant text from nonsense text, however, there may be a few "false positives". Here is what you can do if that happens to you:

• First of all, register with Chatzy (it's free and takes one minute). The limit for registered users is higher, simply because we assume that anonymous users are more likely to spam.
• Ask the room administrator to select the new checkbox: "Allow users to: Paste long texts" in Room Properties. When this box is checked, the system allows much more text to be pasted to a room without showing the spam warning.
• The limit for administrators in Virtual Rooms is high by default (if people spam their own room, it just means nobody will visit it). In Quick Chats, the default level cannot be changed, but registered and Premium Users still have high limits.

Taking the above into consideration, you shouldn't have any problems. If you have just gotten the spam message, you may have to wait up to five minutes. Within this period, please don't paste long messages; it will extend the ban period. To know when you can continue, try pasting a small message once every minute.

Because Chatzy is created entirely with JavaScript - and does not rely on plug-ins or applets of any kind - the chat service should run smoothly on any browser which supports JavaScript (99% do). Furthermore, Chatzy uses standard Web technologies (not any obscure ports or protocols) and should therefore be able to pass through corporate firewalls without any problems.

Chatzy has been thoroughly tested with the latest version of the main browsers:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.5
• Google Chrome 2.0
• Internet Explorer 7 and 8 on Windows
• Safari 3 and 4 on Mac OS X
• Opera 10
• iPhone/Android browsers based on WebKit

In addition, our aim is that Chatzy continues to work (with minor flaws) in older browsers such as Internet Explorer 6, Netscape Navigator 6 and Internet Explorer for Mac.

Technically, our system doesn't have a limit to how many people can use a chat room simultaneously. Although any IT system will slow down if there are too many users, we have not had any problems yet, even with dozens of users in many chat rooms at the same time.

In 2010, we have, however, chosen to put a limit on our free rooms in order to save resources for paying users. Unless you are a Premium User, you will not be let into a free room with more than 10 concurrent visitors. There is no limit for Premium Rooms or Premium Users (see "Subscriptions" section below).

Maybe because your Internet connection is not fast enough. Due to the way Chatzy functions, there is a short delay from when a user writes a message to the moment it shows up on your screen. With a good Internet connection (such as cable/DSL), this delay should be no more than 0.5-2 seconds during normal activity.

Since we started back in 2001, we have had only very few short periods of downtime, typically in the order of 1-2 hours. We realize uptime is very important for our users and we do everything we can to get as close to 100% as possible.

As preventive maintenance, we restart our servers every Sunday at exactly 8.22 GMT (when it is night in the US, morning in Europe, and afternoon in Asia). This is the time where we have the least amount of traffic. It takes 6-8 minutes for the system to come back up. We apologize for the inconvenience this might give.

The way Chatzy distinguishes between your chat room and everyone else's is by giving it an ID number. This ID number is between 0 and a trillion (up to 12 digits). That means, if anyone can guess a number in a trillion, they can access your chat room. Not very likely, is it?

Like all other Web sites, communication between your browser and our server can, theoretically, be intercepted by an outsider. To avoid this, we now offer secure connections as an add-on to the chat rooms. When secure connections are enabled (https://www.chatzy.com), all communication is encrypted using 128-bit SSL, the standard also used for sending credit card information via the Internet.

Chatzy is very safe to use:

• First of all, Chatzy does not install any programs on your computer, but relies on JavaScript commands which are carried out by your Internet browser. Thus, if you trust your Internet browser (which you normally can), you can trust the Chatzy service - contrary to independent chat and instant messaging programs which may or may not include bugs or spyware.
• Secondly, there is no way Chatzy can transfer a virus or execute code from another chat user on your computer. The only thing that passes from one chatter to the others is plain text. All HTML tags, and thereby embedded code of any kind, is filtered away. Consequently, there is no need for virus protection in relation to Chatzy.

No, we do not. Furthermore, we never use pop-up/pop-under windows and we try to avoid flashy, disturbing banners.

Well, first of all, you are the one who decides where to spend your time. If you don't like the language in a specific chatroom, we suggest that you don't visit it. It's that simple.

However, in very serious cases, you are free to contact the police. As explained in our privacy policy, we are able to identify individual users by means of their IP address and we are willing to help police or similar authorities in their investigations. We do NOT, however, disclose IP addresses to private users. If your complaint is not serious enough for the police, it is not serious enough for us either.

Fortunately, we have never received a request from the police to disclose an IP address and we hope we never will.

As a measure towards the 0.1% of our users who do not know how to behave themselves, we are displaying a user's partial IP addresses for log-in and rename actions. This makes it more difficult for the mentioned 0.1% to log in as multiple or different (fake) identities in the same chatroom. Furthermore, it clearly shows everybody that we are logging IP addresses, which we hope will deter malicious or deceitful behavior.

An IP address is a number, which all computers on the internet have and which people can usually not change. The number could for instance be 120.121.122.123, which we would display as X.X.X.123. This gives a good indication of which computer the user is behind without compromising the safety/privacy of the user by revealing the full IP address. We realize that it is not the perfect security measure (a deceitful user may still use multiple computers), but it is better than nothing.

In a Quick Chat, you have no control of people, once you have let them in. Your only option is to stop using the room and move your trusted friends or visitors to another room by sending them the new chatroom address.

In a Virtual Room, you can now ban or specifically allow users based on their email address. You can also change the room password from time to time. Of course, these options only apply if you have the administrator password for the chatroom.

We like the idea of being free and we will continue to offer a free, ad-supported chat service. Our success, however, has brought about hosting costs which we are unable to meet without subscriptions.

We offer two different types of subscriptions:

• A Premium User subscription which applies to one user (you!) in all rooms and which is purchased for one year or 3 months at a time.
• A Premium Room subscription which applies to all users of one room and which expires when a certain amount of text (the usage limit) has been written to the room.

We recommend the Premium User subscription if you use Chatzy a lot, but you don't administrate your own rooms. Premium Rooms on the other hand are intended for people that maintain one or several Virtual Rooms.

A Premium User subscription gives you:

• No advertisement. A clean chat experience without banners or promotions.
• Faster updates. Messages appear faster in all rooms you visit.
• No timeouts. You will never be asked to confirm that you are still following a room and you will not be logged out after one hour of inactivity.
• Secure connections. You can access any room via "https:", thereby preventing eavesdropping with industry-strength (128-bit) SSL encryption.
• Unlimited lists. Your lists of personal rooms and room visitors will no longer be limited to 40 items (12 on Chatzy Mobile).
• Unrestricted room access. In our free rooms, we have had to limit the number of non-subscribers to a maximum of 10. As a Premium User, you will always be granted access (without taking up one of the 10 free spots).

A subscription is only 2-3 dollars a month. Show me the options.

A Premium Room gives the best possible chat experience for all visitors:

• No advertisement. A clean chat without banners or promotions.
• Faster updates and no timeouts. Messages appear faster and visitors are not prompted for confirmation every 5 minutes.
• Unrestricted room access. Everybody can enter, there is no limit to the number of visitors.
• Complete chat history. All visitors can access the entire chat history (not just the last 10 KB). The administrator can even recall deleted contents.
• Secure connections. The room can be accessed via "https:", thereby preventing eavesdropping with industry-strength (128-bit) SSL encryption.
• Custom URLs. The room administrator can choose a permanent room address like: chatzy.com/YourName.
• Hosted room option.NEW Show your room on your own website or blog in your own design and without Chatzy logos ("white-labeled").

In the future, we may add more premium features at no extra charge.

We changed the name to "Premium Room". If you activated Chatzy Plus for your room previously, it has simply been converted to a Premium Room (with more features).

When you subscribe to a Premium Room, you must select one of three usage limits. The usage limit is the amount of text that the users can write to the chat room before the premium features are turned off again.

The selected usage limit will be added to the current total usage of the chat room (size of both visible and deleted contents). The result is called the usage limit.

If, for instance, the current total usage of the chat room is 2.5 MB and you select a usage limit of 5 MB, the usage limit becomes 7.5 MB. Once the chat room usage reaches 7.5 MB, the premium features are automatically deactivated (but the chat room is of course still available).

You or others are able to extend the premium features at any time - the purchased usage limit is then added to the existing usage limit. In the example above, you may decide to buy 5 MB more when the total usage of the chat room is 6 MB (before it reaches 7.5 MB). In this case, the usage limit will be raised to 12.5 MB.

In the chatroom, you can always see what the current usage limit is. Simply click on "View Statistics".

Although you can always extend the usage limit, notice that you receive a considerable discount if you purchase a higher usage limit to begin with. Depending on your needs, you can apply three different usage limits to a Premium Room:

• 500 KB is intended for individuals who chat with family or friends once in a while. 500 KB may not sound as much, but it is pure HTML text with no images (unlike emails). 500 KB corresponds to a book of 120-140 pages and should be plenty for occasional chatting.
• 5 MB is intended for heavy personal users or groups of people who meet to discuss a topic at regular intervals. 5 MB HTML text corresponds approximately to the size of the entire Bible in plain-text format and should give even the most enthusiastic groups enough room.
• 50 MB should be purchased by Web masters planning to use the chat room in connection to a high-traffic Web site. Since 50 MB corresponds to a multi-volume encyclopedia, it is recommended for businesses and organizations which do not wish to bother with periodic renewals.

If you can't figure out what usage limit to choose, take a look at the bottom of the purchase form. Unless the chat room is less than 12 hours old, the new usage limit field will show you how long time the premium features will be active at the current usage rate. The value changes as you select different usage limits.

After you fill out our purchase form, you will be directed to a secure server at PayPal. PayPal, an eBay company, is one of the world's largest online payment processors.

All sensitive information is entered and encrypted at PayPal's secure server. Only PayPal will know your credit card details, they will not be available to Chatzy.

If you are not already registered with PayPal, you will have to choose a user name and a password at PayPal's site (as well as entering your credit card details). With this user name and password, you will be able to pay quickly and securely at services which use PayPal as their payment processor in the future.

Once you have completed the transaction at PayPal, please make sure you click the "Continue" button in order to return to Chatzy.com. Only at this point do we get confirmation about your payment.