There is now a new chat room which can be accessed from the "Chat Room" button which is beside Home, Profile, Logout etc up above the boards.
Currently there is only 1 chat room named "General Discussion". There may in future be different rooms added as well but all the buttons and links are not quite ready yet. The "private room" function has also been disabled for the same reason although it is planned to be turned on at some point. So, enough about what is not there or does not work, here is what does work:
LoginYou do not have to login separately, you will automatically log into the chat with your forum name when you click the "Chat Room" button or follow this link:
http://forum.chronicfatiguesyndrome.me.uk/chat/ if you are already logged on to the forums. There is also a link and a look at what is currently being said in General Discussion near the top right of the page, just click the chat bubbles, the ones above the piggy.
If there are people in the chat room the "Chat Room" button will show how many there are. You can open the chat room in another browser tab or window and continue to browse the forum in your original tabs/windows. The chat room is really just another web page like the forum, just that it updates itself as people chat.
You can bookmark that link, separately to the forums if you wish although if you are not logged into the forums a little login screen will come up which takes your forum username and password. Basically if you login to either you login to both although do not appear "chatting" unless you go to the chat page.
Typing a messageJust enter your message in the empty box near the bottom of the screen (above the smilies) then press return or the submit button to the right of the screen. There is also a little number beside the submit button which is in two parts, it starts off as 0/1040 and the first number before the / will increase with each letter you type. This is how many of the characters allowed per message you have used (like you get when texting on a mobile phone). If you run out just send what you have which will reset the it back to zero and you can type the rest in another message.
Smilies
There is a limited set of smilies available, more should become available over time. We just need to find somewhere neat to put them all so the page is not filled with them when you are trying to read the chat window.
BB Code
Some of the tags like Bold, Link and Image ones are available as in the forum (down by the smilies). They work in the same way as the forum ones do. One of the BB Code options is Colour, this opens up a little colour palette where you can chose a colour. Please try and choose something other people will be able to read if you change it. There is a user setting (see below) where you can tick a box called "persist font colour", if this is checked then your font colour stays at whatever you did last instead of you having to use a new colour tag each time.
Online Users
To the right of the screen you will see a smaller window than the main one where all the chat is printed. This window by default shows who is online and gives you some options to do specific things like list who is in the channel. Remember private channels are currently disabled so if you click the link for that you will get a message back saying you can not do it. Also note there is only one channel at the moment.
User Options
Below the submit button there are some little icons, the one which looks like two people opens the online user list as described above. The little spanners instead open your user options where you can change things to suite your own preferences. There are quite a few options in there so to start with it is probably best if you stick with the defaults if you are unsure although please ask if you want to know what anything is.