Chat

You can use the Chat portlet to enter chat rooms and participate in conversations with other online users.  

Tip:  If you cannot access the Chat Tool, this might be due to the fact that all of your pop-up-blockers have not been disabled.  For example, if you have a Yahoo or Google toolbar, you need to disable their pop-up-blockers as well as those of your browser.

See the Installation Guide to configure the Chat Tool to work with SSL sites.

Functions

In the Chat portlet click on a Chat Room to open the Chat Tool.  On the Chat Tool toolbar click to access detailed online help and learn about all Chat Tool functionality.

When you click on a user in the Users Online box, a pop-up menu appears containing the following items:

• Private Message

  To send a private message:

  Click on the person's name from the Users Online section

  Select the Private Message option

  Type your message and click the Send button

  The message will be displayed in the chat discussion section with the user's name highlighted to indicate it was a private message

• Ignore

  To ignore a user click the person's name and choose "Ignore" from the pop-up menu.  This will block all further messages from this person, and the person does not know he/she is being ignored

• Un-Ignore

• Invite to a Room

• Kick/Ban

  The Kick option just removes people from the current chat room or site.  They can get right back in, if they wish.

  The Ban option removes them permanently from the chat room or site.  To unban users, the administrator must click on Admin Chat, click on "Manage" next to the relevant chat room, and then click the "Ban" checkboxes next to banned users to "unban" them.

• Assign Rights

When you click on a chat room in the Chat Rooms box, a pop-up menu appears containing the following items:

• Switch room

• Delete room

• Change topic

• Kick/Ban

From the toolbar you can change text color and add bold, italics, underlines, smileys, and other "emoticons" to your message.  The speaker icon toggles sound notification with new messages.  The ! icon toggles on and off the popup of messages into the foreground of your computer screen when they arrive.  The printer icon allows you to print the chat transcript.  The disk icon allows you to save the chat transcript.  

Although they are documented in the online help for the Chat Tool, the following Chat Tool functions are not supported by JICS:

• moderated chat rooms

• private chat rooms

• invitations

• room security