Good day to everyone

As many of you are aware, we've operated a chat server for our community for 15 years. I'm the nostalgic type, so this might get long. Jump to the long link near the bottom if you don't care about back story.

I remember the first time I showed up at this little community in '99. I was greeted by a very gray Volano Chat program that had very few features and liked to crash, a lot. Fast forward a few years and we had cycled thru a few more programs. Ultimately in 2003 we discovered RealChat. Ever since it has been our home, and any other chat program we've encountered has never quite compared.

The Internet is changing. It was a novelty back in the late 90s; reserved mostly for geeky kids and adults. Today it is omnipresent and integrated into the lives of basically every person in the modern world. Along the way there have been many popular programs to fall victim to this change.

On January 14th, 2014, RealChat will no longer work. A victim of the modern age. In an attempt to tighten security to stop the spread of malware, Oracle has decided to block all unsigned Java applets. We can't do anything to stop this. As a result, RealChat will die.

After looking for replacement programs and finding nothing that we liked, we decided to build our own system. Because why not? We're programmers at heart, afterall.

I introduce to you a work in progress - UnrealChat!

Nothing is finished. The UI isn't complete. Most of the commands and features aren't obvious yet. Sorry. Working on it. Use /help to get a list of available commands. For some helpful chat commands and a full list of smileys check out this page. Mouse over the images to get their chat code.

Feel free to poke around the chat room and do give us your feedback! We'd love to hear all of your suggestions for features, design elements, anything you can think of. Please be aware that when actually working on the chat program we have to restart the chat server to apply changes. It may be broken from time-to-time, but we'll try and generally leave it in a working state.

Please respect our existing site rules! Do NOT impersonate staff.

I look forward to hearing your feedback. Thanks all!

Note - you do *not* need Java or any extra software to use the new chat server. It will work from any modern browser on PCs, phones, tablets, game consoles, etc.