One year of PartyChat

Today marks one year since PartyChat launched. During that time, I've definitely fallen prey to the "eh, it works well enough" mentality, but thankfully a couple of my friends have not. Just in time for PartyChat's one year anniversary, Dolapo and Kushal have added some new features. Dolapo added ++points, a way of assigning points to whatever you feel like... it's a popular little feature we've had in internal chat rooms at Google for a while now. Kushal fixed a number of bugs in Dolapo's code as well adding /me actions, a popular IRC feature.

To give ++points, just type word++ and the scorer will assign a point to the word. Type word-- and it'll subtract a point. We generally use ++points to reward good behavior and penalize Kushal for bad puns. To check scores just type /score or /score word to get the score of just the word. You'll also notice that for some reason we also keep track of the ++points on the last letter of each word -- that's an homage to one of the, uh, the minor bugs in the original implementation of the point tracker.

To use /me actions, begin a message with /me (for example, /me is hungry) and all the members of the PartyChat will get the message in italics with your email/alias substituted in for /me (back to the example, if your alias was "punshal," PartyChat would say punshal is hungry).

Now that I've got Dolapo and Kushal on board, hopefully there'll be even more features coming! One can only hope. So here's to another year of PartyChat -- keep chattin'.