It's so cool. Thanks elves

Bob Sihler wrote:How about we establish a chatroom specifically for global warming and banish the subject from the forums?

(I'm only half-kidding.)

GLOBAL WARMING AND REALITY TV WILL BE THE DEATH OF US ALL.

tazz wrote:Why not start a poll thread SoCal (or anyone else), if it bothering you that much? Ask the community what they think. I know many will click a poll button rather than get on the hamster wheel of arguing on the net. That way you can see pure #s of folks are for it, against it or just plain don't care.

Well, that should have been done in the first place.

ahhh, you sound so defeated. I am sorry for that. the only way to find out is to post the poll. Go for it, I dare ya.

anita wrote:chat, apps, farmville... all things that will contribute to the dumbing down of SP
what's next? flashing, singing, lame myspace/dating website profiles?

frapping! bring back the pOrn.

Matt: I don't care if chat exists for those that want to use it. What I do care about is that I, as a user of this website, cannot choose to disable it completely, and that includes the light-gray box in the lower right-hand corner.

So I opened my work laptop to see how this app bar is on it. My laptop is XP running IE 6.0 and Mozilla 3.6.12.

While logged in in IE, the app doesn't show up at all. This might be due to my company blocking it or my IE settings blocking it.

While logged in in M, the app appears. When I first log in the full app bar stretches across the bottom. Once selected to be hidden, it remains hidden (except for the gray box at lower right) even when I open up a new M window.

So it appears you have fixed the annoying chat window problem of it always opening up as a default whereby users have to keep manually minimizing it.

By the way, SoCalHiker mentioned the gray box ("arrow") being annoying and you said it rarely covers anything. Well, I can say that's not true for me. For example, when viewing the home page, the "Featured Pages" images and captions at far right get obscured in the lower right-corner. Example: When viewing submitted pages, the text at far right edge of a line is obscured by the gray arrow box. It may not seem like much to the person who created in the first place, but to me it's just another thing cluttering the visual appeal of the site.

The games are just dumb and not at all germane to the intent of this site. Just because you could implement them, it doesn't mean you had to. Not all sites have to be like Zuckerbook.

I haven't read ALL the posts here, maybe this has been covered. A bit annoying, down on the chat bar you get a pop up saying when you have received a new message (PM). Problem is long after you have opened and read the message, the pop up still tells you that you have a new message.

Really--why are people complaining about having another tool to more easily communicate with other members? As was mentioned earlier, it's easy to hide the chat function.

No, this feature won't add to or improve site content. It also won't balance my checkbook, take out my garbage or bring world peace either. That doesn't mean it can't still be useful.

The chat etc. bar settings needs to be controlled via a user control panel within SP, not have these settings change depending on clicking a shortcut or cookies.
A lot of people would prefer logging into summitpost with the chat 'off', not have to click on the minimize button.
I check SP sometimes on my blackberry, the bar's data slows things down, it resizes, I have to fight to get the pointer on the minimize, the chat doesn't even work, and then I click next page and it's back.

Even as simple as it is to minimize the bar and how little the gray box is when it's minimized, I suppose it makes sense to have an option to allow people to completely disable chat (not even show the little gray box in the lower right). I find it surprising that it would actually cover or obscure anything on the page that couldn't be resolved by simply scrolling down a little bit. But Luc's reason about the bar slowing down things on a small handheld makes good sense, though the issues of it popping back up when navigating to the next page are supposed to be resolved in the next release.

In any case, I'll work on making an option for people to completely disable chat in their user settings when I get back home. I had to make unexpected trip (death in the family), so I won't be able to work on it until next week at the earliest.

Dear colleagues, I'm afraid I can't do other than confirm what I wrote one or two days ago as to my suspicions for the reasons of the SP site being slowed down.
Why this?
On Apple Safari, the chat and applications bar doesn't appear any more (disabled?).
Just tonight at 1:30 a.m. Central European time I went onto SP on Firefox, where all of the apps and the new version of the forums appear. Again, everything took extremely long to open. Then, immediately, I switched to Apple Safari, where, as I stated, the bar doesn't appear anymore, the one snag being that the new version of the forums doesn't work; you can read everything, but you can't post anything yourself. Everthing opened at the perfectly normal speed!! I can't be hallucinating or imagining things...
I don't know how it is for all the other users in general - I will go back now to opening the SP website on Apple Safari and will only use Firefox if I intend to post something on the forums.

I've visited this forum every few hours since about 7:15 AM PST. Some times SP was very slow to load; other times it was nearly instantaneous. I don't think the problems come from the chat, which has been hidden on my browser since SP chat was initiated.

MoapaPk wrote:I've visited this forum every few hours since about 7:15 AM PST. Some times SP was very slow to load; other times it was nearly instantaneous. I don't think the problems come from the chat, which has been hidden on my browser since SP chat was initiated.

Are the applications/games Flash pre-loads?

Error console on Firefox,
clear console,
refresh page,
22 errors related to chat, that's more than 2/3rd of the errors in the list.
sp-chat-applications-chatrooms-and-notifications-t56743-75.html

not a programmer, so I can't know if this means anything at all.