Hello people,

The chatrooms are unmoderated at the moment and we would like to keep it that way, so please use them responsibly and don't cause unnecessary problems for site management or our community.

Some things you should know about the rooms:

The Foyer is a public chatroom it's open to people outside our community and is also published else where so be mindful of that when posting in there.

Hot House, Mad House and Chill Zone are all private rooms where only members here have access. Dev Zone is just somewhere for the site admins to have real time communication if they need to talk and work on issues at the same time. Only sys admins and devs have access for that reason.

We can add more rooms if you have suggestions let us know. Be warned that the chat service as it is now is a trial and at the end of a month the extra rooms and some functionality will be removed unless we pay for these features. If we don't fund the chat service we will be reduced to one room which will be private and there will be ads presented in the room.

More things to know:

We haven't written a manual yet so you will need to experiment.

If you look top right there is a symbol A which increases or decreases the text size. Next to that is the button to open the current room in a new window, which means you can open other rooms in different windows. The +/- button hides the top menu bar.

The Room in the top bar allows you to view a list of the available rooms. Once you select a room a new tab opens the first tab gives you access to the other rooms and the tabs to the right are the rooms you have active in your session. You can move from room to room via tabs or break them out as described above.

Text area and user pain Text area is obvious and the user pain allows you to see who is active in your session. You can enter private chats by clicking on a uses name and inviting them. If they accept a private session will be created.

In room private text can be sent using the names list bottom left of screen with a padlock symbol next to it. Select a name in the list and click the pad lock should allow your text to only be seen by the person selected. Try it and see you will need three people to test.

Personalisation: You can personalise your text by clicking on the pallet icon above the names list just pick a colour to suit your mood. Smilies can be sent using the smiley icon, all text can be erased using the eraser and finally you can filter the messages on screen to reduce clutter should you need to. The speaker symbol mutes the audio notification.

In the private rooms you will notice a series of links at the top of the room, which allows you to catch up with convocations over various amounts of time.

Please note that although the rooms are private the conversations are logged at the server which is not owned or controlled by us. We have access to the logs if we need to moderate or resolve complaints or other issues. As of this writing there are only two people with access to those logs, this will probably remain tightly controlled in order to offer the most privacy that we here at Sanctum Zone can realistically achieve. We have no intention of abusing your trust, so please don't give use reason to trawl through the chat logs. At this stage I'm not sure if private room discussions are logged, but with testing we will find out and let you know in good time. For your own privacy please assume that all areas of chat are logged and act accordingly.

Enjoy
SanctumZone.co.uk

I would just like to add, there are two ways to access the Chat rooms area.

1. The 'Live Chat' link in the uppermost website menu.
This will take you to Chat in the same browser window.

2. The 'Chat' black tab located in the forum menu between 'My Topics' and 'PM's'
Please Note - This link differs from number one, it has been provided as a pop up link for chatting on the fly without losing your place on the forum. It will pop up as an extra window on top of your browser. You can then use Chat as per normal in that pop up window without your browser losing its place on the forum...for example while you are making a post or thread.

Thanks.

I just want to post up the direct URL of the Blastchat chatrooms we have. Since these chatrooms are hosted by Blastchat and not on our server, this address could be used in the event of a server failure etc. as an off site point of communication for members...so members can bookmark this link if they like... (please note, it is a long link )

https://www.blastchat.com/index2.php?option=com_blastchat&task=client&ctask=chat&if=&dt=0&iid=7988292445939f835072467d630192e8&pk=10e4e00e2c2d590c8b1e91cd6093b748&tk=2012-06-17%2001:37:57&sc=fdd0cc65d4c1919a8f26f06e48afb135&uid=0&ugid=0&ug=0&nick=&rid=0&bcid=140&bcv=3.6&avt=http%3A%2F%2Fsanctumzone.co.uk%2Fmedia%2Fkunena%2Favatars%2Fnophoto.jpg&p=Joomla!&r=2.5&d=4


This link takes you straight to the Sanctum Zone chatrooms, but since it is not embedded in our site, when accessed in this direct manner you will have to add a username to get in. The username will have to be different to your username here, since the room assumes that name is taken, should you want to access it directly from the link above. For example if I wanted to get into the chat I could enter 'novum2' as my username, so thats just a suggestion to put a number on the end of your existing username, so as to still be recognised by other members.

As I said, it can be bookmarked incase of site failure here. Ordinarily you would simply access the chat from the chat menu here, which gives automatic entry for logged in members, no need to add a username. You enter the room automatically with your existing username when the chat is accessed from the website chat menu.

Frog wrote:
Just an update on the room logs after testing and looking through the administration functions.

All the chatrooms are logged, the public foyer and private members rooms. At present it is myself and Frog who are the only two that have access to the logs.

However, should you select a private conversation with another member, these are not logged, there are no provisions for logging member to member private conversations in Blastchat.

Thankyou.

Cheers.

Bookmarked

psketti wrote:
Thanks sketti.

I added a link to the chatroom in the announcement box on the old sanctum forum, so it might be worth mentioning here also...the old sanctum forum link is much shorter

Old Sanctum Forum squire.forumotion.co.uk/

So if anyone wants to bookmark that link, you can go to the old sanctum forum, and the chat link in the announcement box takes you directly to the chatroom foyer also.

So thats another way to get there incase the site is down here.

Hi gang,

I just clicked the blastchat link so I could save it in my bookmark but when I entered my desired nickname, it did nothing.

I keyed coco and hit enter but it did nothing. I am in USA and on Firefox. Please advise.

Sincerely yours,
The Forum Problem Child

P.S. If worse come to worse I'll pop in the old Sanctum forum.

Coco wrote:
Hi Coco,

With BlastChat which is the first link in the drop down menu you're logged in automatically provided you're logged in to the site. There are no geolocation restrictions applied by us.
This is should take you into the foyer if you're logged in.

The link Novum gave to access the chat in the event that the main server goes down is a direct link to the chat server. It's not the same as the menu link which will not work if our server is off line. If you visit the chat server via the direct link you will need to sign in as a guest, because you can't authenticate against your account here if the server is down.

If you visit this link Direct Chat Server Link then add that page to your bookmarks as Sanctum Zone Offline Chatroom or something meaningful to you.

Hope that helps.

Basically what Frog said coco.

If you use the direct link... 'coco' wont work. Or anyones existing usernames...because the chat assumes the names are taken and cant cross reference who you are, when it is the direct link (not on our site)

So if you simply make another name of your choice, perhaps one thats even just one character different so as to still be recognised... coco2 for example, you will find that you will be able to enter the room using the direct link.

novum wrote:
On account of that link above being the longest link i have ever seen, i used one of those free URL redirect services to create a shorter link that will take us to the above link automatically. This link is much shorter

tinyurl.com/Sanctum-Zone-Chat

Thanks Frog and Novum.

I was able to access chat via Frog's link - even greeted a fellow roomie. ( )

When I tried the direct link nothing happened again, must be me. (duh!)

Tell ya what, if worse comes to worse, I shall learn how to access things.

Thank you so much for your kind help.

Update: Just for the sake of experiment, I tried signing in direct to chat as 'goofball' and it worked!!!

Bookmarking!

Got a strange question...

When I logged in to blast chat I accidentally copied and pasted the sanctum zone url in there I don't know how I managed that.

Now when I go there my name comes up as https://sanctumzone - doh! Can I change that?

LesleyPumpshaft wrote:
Did you access the Blast chat as a guest? If you did you would have had to enter a user name which is the data used to generate the user name in the chatroom. If you're logged into the website you should automatically be logged in to blast chat with your user name. If not there will probably be a cookie set on your machine which has stored the guest login name. To clear that you will need to delete the cookies/history from your machine.

I think most people now use the new chat system which you can access from the top menu > Live Chat > Fast Chat > and selecting one of the display options.

Ah, I see, thanks for that Frog