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 "Chatzy Plus" section below).

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

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 choose what features the users should have access to, you can define both user and administrator passwords and custom welcome messages. And you can change all properties (such as the title/subject) at any time after the chat starts.

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 accessed 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.

Chat rooms for which add-on features have been purchased will, however, be kept open for a minumum of 6 months, from the time they were last used. If they are used 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).

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 doublecheck 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.

When there has been no activity in your chat room for a period of time, you must choose whether you want to stay in the chat room or leave it. Since your computer will not check for new messages until you confirm that you want to stay, this saves resources for more active users.

The period of inactivity before you are asked depends on your Internet connection speed and on whether you have activated message alerts or not. With message alerts on, you will typically be asked after 40 minutes. Without them, since the chat is assumed to be more active, your computer checks for new messages more frequently and prompts you after approximately 10 minutes.

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 other online chat systems and 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)

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 most corporate firewalls without any problems.

Chatzy has been successfully tested with the following browsers and operating systems:

• Internet Explorer 7.0 on Windows Vista
• Internet Explorer 6.0 (SP1) on Windows XP
• Internet Explorer 5.5 on Windows 2000
• Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac on Mac OS X (10.2.2)
• Mozilla Firefox 2.0
• Netscape Navigator 6.2
• Opera 7.21

There is no fixed 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.

Probably 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.

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.

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.

Chatzy Plus is the name of our subscription-based chat service. When Chatzy Plus is active in a chat room, no advertisement is shown, secure connections are available and full chat history can be recalled. In the future, we may add more features to Chatzy Plus at no charge.

Chatzy Plus is activated when one of the users of a chat room pays a small fee, and it is deactivated after a certain amount of text (the usage limit) has been written to the chat room. Chatzy Plus can be activated by everybody (both administrators and regular users) and in both a Quick Chat and a Virtual Room. We recommend the use of Virtual Rooms, however, since these can be modified and password protected by the administrator(s).

Chatzy Plus is available via a link on the log-in page of all rooms.

When you activate Chatzy Plus, 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 Chatzy Plus 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, Chatzy Plus is automatically deactivated (but the chat room is of course still available).

You or others are able to extend Chatzy Plus 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 activate Chatzy Plus with three different usage limits:

• 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 Chatzy Plus 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.