More features you never asked for

There's been a flurry of changes to PartyChat lately, so I feel the need to shout-out some love to everyone who's been pitching in.

• Dolapo spends much of his life fantasizing about what it would be like if he were a dinosaur who spoke Perl. Unfortunately for him, he's really really bad at writing regular expressions (I'm not kidding, he's terrible). To compensate, he added a feature so you can now correct your past errors thanks to the power of regexps.
  

  me: man, Kushal sure is horny today.
    whoops
    s/ho/co/
  partychat: "dolapo" meant man, Kushal sure is corny today

• I won't lie, a lot of us spend far too much time at work using PartyChat, which isn't much of a productivity boost. Sometimes you really need to focus, so on my behest, Dolapo implemented a /snooze feature which allows you to ignore the inane babble of your friends for a while without having to exit a chat. Just type something like /snooze 45m and then enjoy 45 minutes of productive serenity.
  


• Wondering why Dolapo had -56 ++points despite implementing useful features, the ever resourceful Mihai added a /reasons command which prints out the reasons for someone's ++point score
  

  me: /reasons dolapo
  partychat: dolapo:-56
    increment by steve...@gmail.com
    decrement by ak...@q00p.net (for not helping)
    decrement by ak...@q00p.net (for making my eyes bleed)
    ...

• Programmers are notoriously bad about writing documentation, and PartyChat developers are no exception. In order to force better hygiene on us, Michael refactored my (ugly, ugly) command parser and made it easier to update the help messages that prints when you type /commands. So thanks to him, you can now learn everything you wanted to know about PartyChat but were too afraid to ask.

PartyChat's back up!

We had a different issue than we previously though, so I'm happy to say that we're back up earlier than I thought. All your old rooms and ++points should be back.

gah!

As you may have noticed, the partychat#@gmail accounts are down right now. Due to a series of SNAFUs, I can't restart them till Monday morning. In the meantime, we have a temporary PartyChat instance running at tahcytrap@gmail.com. You'll have to recreate/rejoin your chat rooms (/make room-name & /join room-name), but hopefully that'll tide you over until I can restart the regular system on Monday.

Sorry about that =/. I feel even worse than the twitter kitty.

P.S. A big thanks to Michael for temp hosting in the meantime!

PartyChat flakiness

Apologies for the higher-than-average PartyChat flakiness recently, we've hopefully fixed the problem, so things should be stabler moving forward.

The problem, for those who are curious, is that PartyChat uses the Smack library to connect to Google Talk. Google Talk was sending us delayed information (e.g. offline chat) information with poorly formatted time stamps (e.g. "200753T17:56:30") which would cause the connection to die. My friend, and new PartyChat addict, Neil upgraded us to the newest version of Smack in a hurry and turned off the delayed message parser which, for now, seems to have solved the problem.

You also may have stumbled upon a number of unannounced new commands in PartyChat recently -- I hope to post an update explaining how to use these features in detail soon.