We haven't touched the chat server in over a year, so it's nothing on our side. I know that's of little consolation to people having problems, but it's just to reassure you that nothing has changed in our configuration.

At some point this year, we may very well move on to another chat server -- one that isn't based upon people having a certain version of Java installed on their computer. Although our current server is very stable and never seems to give us any serious problems, it seems more and more people are having troubles as they upgrade to Vista or IE7 (both of which are only going to become more and more commonplace).

This is fairly high on our development priority list to investigate alternatives and get one in place here. One we looked at late last year turned out not to have the customizability to the interface we were looking for (to make it look as close as possible to our current chat room), but we have a whole list of others to check out.

Here's one to check out:

http://dev.tufat.com/demo/chat/flashchat.php

Enter in any chat name and no password to try it out (it's called FlashChat). The user interface -- what the chat room actually looks like -- is very customizable, so don't look at it for what it looks like when you first log in, but rather that it simply works on your computer. It does require Flash installed on your computer.

There are other chat rooms we are also investigating.

Thanks,
DocJohn