Frequently Asked Questions
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.
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:
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.
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:
If none of this works, you can easily create a new chat room.
The most important characteristics are:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Currently, Chatzy does not support Web cams. We are considering whether or not we should include this feature in a future version.
Saving the chat room can mean two different things:
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).
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.
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.
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:
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.
This behavior has nothing to do with Chatzy - it is a feature of Microsoft Internet Explorer (and other browsers). Fortunately, it is easy to disable. In Internet Explorer, simply find this checkbox and clear it: Tools (5th menu on the menu bar) => Internet Options (last menu item) => Content (tab) => AutoComplete (button) => Use AutoComplete for Forms (checkbox)
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:
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 now 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.
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 10 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 month, from the time they were last used. If they are used regularly, they will stay open indefinitely.
No, we do not.
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. For this reason, we reserve a space in the chat rooms for a single banner ad which changes every two minutes. (We never use pop-up/pop-under windows and we try to avoid flashy, disturbing banners.) Taking into account our time spent on the site, we are far from profitable. |
