Attached Link: http://www.rendergods.com

A site the size of R'osity generally requires a chatroom even if it's not used that much. It adds to the interaction between users and is a welcome place for planned events. DAZ has it, CGTalk also. Now in terms of actual chat rooms, to my knowledge, there are really only a few site-integratable chat rooms. The following are the *ways* or client apps which you can integrate the chat into the site:

A) Java - The previous one R'osity had. Somewhat long time to load and required users to have Java installed. Java is also bulky and prone to crashes, so that was -thankfully- out.

B) Javascript - This one takes less to load, doesn't come with any installation kits, but in the examples I've seen it in action it wasn't very customizable in terms of looks and so on. Also it  basically relied on refreshing the page constantly, which if you have that click sound in IE or in some other browser, can get horribly annoying.

C) PHP - Probably the best option. I looked at FlashChat, the same app that R'osity bought, and it is pretty customizable, although for some reason, on my P4 2.4Ghz HT 1GB RAM computer it seemed bulky, almost java-ish. All the same, most likely the best choice until a lightweight AJAX chat comes along that will be fast and customizable enough not to be burdensome. For the record, the reason why you have to log in to FlashChat is that it comes with its own database. What you guys probably did was simply pair it with your list of users so they could use the same login and passwords as on the site. Spiffy, although doing it automatically with a little hacking could probably work.

Now in terms of chat rooms, you still need a server for your client to join. The grand daddy of all chat 'technologies' is IRC or Internet Relay Chat. It's been around for years and there are milions of people still using it. You might have heard of mIRC, its most popular chat client (an actual windows app instead of on-site client apps). I'm not exactly sure if FlashChat functions off IRC or just mimes an IRC server (seeing how many of the commands are the same)... Most likely the latter. Anyway, there are hundreds of IRC servers and millions of rooms out there, it's customizable on the client side with dozens of apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. While it has received a bad rep over the years for being rather un-monitored and therefore full of piracy and lamers, it really has been a success story in terms of an almost universal way of getting people to communicate. Some servers are worse than others, depending on the size and so on.

A few years back when I noticed people wouldn't come to R'osity's Java chat room because it was slow, bulky and took a long time to load, I created RenderGods, an IRC channel first hosted on EsperNet and now on Freenode. It's received hundreds of users and has proven that if you give someone a chat room to talk about 3D art, people will come. I've only advertised it here, mostly in the Bryce forum, and I have to say that it's been a sucessful experiment in terms of offering people a place to talk about things that matter to them. It's been policed superbly by fellow Renderosity users with the very same rules that govern this place and it's helped many people with advice, tutorials, free models (you can trade files on IRC). As a case study, it's been magnificent. Most importantly, because of the variety of ways to join it (all of the above plus mIRC), and because Freenode is absolutely excellent in terms of reputation, people came. It's no wonder that CGTalk has its own channel there with some 60-80 users at all times. RenderGods, with no huge site or advertisement behind it, manages to pull off anywhere between 7 to 20 users daily with few dead times in terms of chat. You could even make regular announcements, links to different sold items from the store, etc.

Unfortunately I haven't had as much time as I wanted to keep up the work with the site and the channel, lately, but I do believe that if you guys made the effort to at least consider it as a place for people to go to, according to your own rules and with the adequate support (even unofficially), you would gain a whole lot from it. In my experience, a steady influx of users, especially with IRC, where with broadband I can keep myself logged in via mIRC for days, better channel security with ChanGuard than any human, and basically no extra bandwidth on your end given the external server, you could gain a whole lot more.

So basically I'm asking R'osity, hat in hand, to consider making RenderGods its unnoficial chat channel, at the very least, provided adequate security measures are in place. It's better for the users and the community. If not I will most likely shut it down due to a lack of resources and time on my end, although I am willing to help out with this experiment as much as I can.

Email is mihnead@gmail.com. And you're welcome to visit us on www.rendergods.com. I think the java client works.

m