New Chat... update on some issues

:DThe chat session last Sunday debuted our new chat program (FlashChat). Overall, it performed pretty well.

There were two annoying problems, however....

1. Slowdown -- a number of users experienced a dramatic slowdown of their PC and had to close and reopen chat to resolve the situation. In fact, I experienced that same situation during a test session several days before the upgrade. I'm told that one cause "could be" caused by Macromedia Flash Player version 7, which is a plugin you have in your browser. Apparently there were memory leak problems with version 7 which Macromedia subsequently fixed in version 8, so, upgrade to 8 if you can. I realize FP8 is not available to our Linux users... not much I can do there. Most Windows-Firefox users already have FP8, but check just in case. IE users are a mixed bag -- some have FP7, some FP8... so check and upgrade if you find you have FP7. Those of you who use other browsers will have to check what's supported.
2. Timeout -- a number of users experienced a login timeout - ie, suddenly they were asked to login again. Tufat ( the vendor who supplies flashchat) has been pretty silent on the cause of these types of problems... I don't think they're covering up anything, they just don't know what to tell people since the cause usually lies in the no-man's land interface between flashchat and vbulletin. I'll be tweaking a few settings others have recommended helped them... we'll see if that helps in next weeks chat.

(If you have problems or don't know how to check the version/upgrade your flash player, post here and we'll try to help.... be sure to include what operating system you're using (eg, win xp) and what browser/release (eg, forefox 1.5.0.3)).