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Debate Unlimited Community Chat

It's a chatroom for the site. Membership is arranged with Google's Friends Connect technology.

Clackpoint is the chatroom, Google Friend Connect is what makes it integrate with the rest of the site and the mighty interwebs 2.0.

How to chat.

There's nobody here. What do I do? Leave the tab open. If somebody passes through they may poke you. Or if there is somebody showing in the room you can poke them. Poking somebody simply plays “the claxon of death” on their machine. Obviously this works to alert somebody of your presence in the room provided the tab is still open and they have audio on. Poking is done by right clicking the name of the person you want to interact with. Mac users obviously do something else, what that is I don't know, if you figure out what it is please tell me. Poke is one of several options that appears. Another one is kick. Anybody can kick anybody else out of the room, but banning people is something only I can do.

Audio and Video Chat

To use either audio or video chat you need to have equipment at both ends. This tool cannot be used to broadcast either sound or video to hidden passive observers. There is no point in messing with audio or video unless at least two people have the right equipment. For audio you need a microphone and speakers, although it is strongly encouraged that you use headphones or a combined headset to avoid echo problems. The audio is full duplex, meaning both parties are simultaneously transmitting and receiving, like on a telephone. However it may be better to operate as if this was not the case, and to conduct conversations in the form of “overs” because there can be significant time lags which play havoc with conventional social cues as to when to start and stop talking. The time lags are caused by the distances involved which can often be significantly further than the shortest possible distance between the two points as a connection from Exeter to Houston may go via three or four other locations on the ground plus a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, which will add an extra 71,572 km to the trip, adding quite a few milliseconds of delay, long enough to completely bamboozle the social skills evolved by our species for communicating at close quarters in dark huts and caves. This is where the raise hand function can come in. If people raise their hand when they are talking (toggle the raise hand button to raise) and drop it again when they are about to stop speaking people can talk fluidly without talking over each other, but of course you can still laugh and make other semi-verbal noises, clear your throat or otherwise suggest your impatience that they let you get a word in edgewise. Also you can raise your hand to show you would like to speak.

Clocks

There are two clocks. The map clock shows WET by default, which is the time in the UK, you can mouse over the map and get the time anywhere else in the world so you can see what time it is for people on the other side of the world.

The analogue clock is on GMT (also known as UTC) this is the default “Earth Time” which is also the default setting on the forum. In the winter months this is the same as the local time in Britain, in the summer it is not. Of course the two clocks should be in precise synchronization, but Flash within a browser isn't quite perfect so don't complain if there's a slight miss-match, it will still be more accurate than a genuine Rolex or Breitling could ever hope to be.

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited