Yes it could be done. I’m not sure what I would need to get it set up for that. Is this to avoid getting the popup windows that go along with the private messages? I’ll be setting up a newer version of the applet this weekend. This version allows one to easily ignore people that send private messages. This may help. It also has better Netscape on a Mac support.

At this time there is no way for the end user to specify “no private message windows” when creating the chat room. There is probably a dozen or so other less interesting functions that could be offered for the end user to configure but I have left them out on the current chat code creater. Once my database is working and I’m confident that it can handle things I’ll work on a code creation page that will allow for every possible end user option to be speicified. The only exception will be the free version which will have less options.

About all I can do at this time is make an option that can be toggled in which all private messages will not create a popup window but be displayed in the main window instead.

I will give a serious look into setting up what you require as far as disabling them completely. What your using the room for is one of the very things I had expected them to be used for and I had figured that private messages would get in the way.

They still will only be seen by the recipient.

The pay version was planned on for last year and was a completely different setup and quite expensive for me to provide. Then our house burnt down and now my family and I live in 3 rooms in the basement of a CBRF (Community Based Residential Facility) that my mother’n law owns and my wife Administrates. My time is spread out trying to get a home of our own again along with a number of other contracting jobs I’m trying to get finished.

I have since decided against the expensive route because I didn’t feel like spending a new car payment a month to provide free chat services. Using advertising to cover the costs of operating this hobby of mine doesn’t work. I tried, made about 2 dollars and 71 cents, (enough for a 6pack of pepsi) after about 52,000 banner ads had been displayed in 2 weeks. So, knowing that dot com’s are dropping by the wayside as they fail to cover their overhead and knowing I’d rather just close up and never turn a computer on again rather than spend 250 a month for the expensive route (plus an initial 10 grand for equipment and software) I decided to keep it as low budget as possible. I teach myself what I need to create the things I want and to make things I do purchase act the way I want. I am not a schooled programmer of any sort. I just like programming. I read, I create, I make mistakes, I fix them, I learn. I’m currently teaching myself about mysql database use so I can store the required information for the paid services. It’s coming along slowly and I try to work on things as much as possible. If I could have a month of 12-14 hours a day spent on this I’m sure it would be done and running. As it stands my time varries from 2 hours to 4 hours a night or more if it’s a weekend and I don’t have to work the next day. At this rate it will probably be mid summer or perhaps the end of summer when I have things wrapped up.

The window size question has been coming up more lately. I think the low cost of larger monitors has more people using the higher resolution screen settings. Now that I’m using PHP to power the website I think I’ll be able to offer the ability for users to select the size of the chat room prior to login. I do have a list of things to work on for the chat rooms and this is on that list.