On April 16, 2000, Holli Van Nest wrote:

> I need to set up an online chat for several groups of kids who will
> be participating from many different locations.  Having never done
> this before and knowing nothing about it, I thought I'd look to your
> wisdom.

I wanted to give you an update of what we ended up doing.  Thanks to
everyone who wrote with very good suggestions.  We ended up going
with a very simple free software called EveryChat.  It runs out of
your website's CGI-BIN so you do already have to have that set up,
which we did.

Once set up, you get an almost blank screen with a place to login
with the username of your choice, and then when you are logged in, a
place to post messages.  The rest of the screen just showed the chat
posts.  There were no ads or other distractions, which, for a group
of kids, was a big plus.

We were able to screen for profanity, and download a log post-chat.
There is also a feature to boot people out if they start being
inappropriate for the chat, etc.  We didn't get that feature working
before the chat, but we should be able to before the next one.  It
all worked very simply and smoothly.

You can find out more at www.everychat.com.

Holli

*********
Holli Van Nest

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