Anyone who took a few minutes to visit or participate in Xat’s first celebrity chat (congratulations and a big welcome to Ashley Leggat continued success here on Xat!) surely noticed Xat’s new Cyan colored pawn.
This Pawn, as we’ve been told, has been set aside and designated as the official celebrity-only colored pawn (see screenie below).
We look forward to more celebrity spottings here on Xat.com 
Xat has just added a new security feature that more effectively protects your account against potential phishing.
How it works
Users that only access their Xat accounts from home or from one specific computer, can now activate “account locking”. This will restrict access to your Xat account to only the one computer that has initiated the lock. If you were to move house or change internet providers you would first have to turn off locking beforehand.
IMPORTANT: xat staff will never ask you to turn off account locking. If anyone asks you to turn off account locking they are trying to access your account and steal your stuff..
Just over a year ago, before Xat vote ever existed, I posted a message to the Community forum that, for the most part, went unnoticed. In it I proposed the idea of a Xat Trade ticker; like a stock ticker. I included a few images and a rather cryptic one sentence message that simply stated the following:
“What about a realtime ticker that tracks the actual exchange rate of the TRADE and CAMBIO safe trade transactions”.
Today, looking back on that message and looking more closely at our xat to day converter I realize that this is taking place on various levels throughout Xat already. Still I’m convinced that a push to total automation and the implementation of an actual “Xat ticker” would be immensely valuable to everyone.
Where to put it? How about above all official trade chats? It could be tied in directly to only official trade chat logs, only for safe trades, and could update on the fly, continuously and non-stop 24/7. Xat could simply implement an algorithm that removed any outliers (keeping potential scam trade out of the equation) and looked more specifically at the mode of each trade. How exciting would it be to see in real-time that Clear was either increasing or decreasing dramatically? It would entice people to either buy buy buy or sell sell sell, making the entire experience much more dynamic!
Here’s just a very rough idea (I couldn’t find the type of ticker I was hoping for) [click here to view full image]:
Nothing official here (not yet anyway), but a fellow xatBlogs user has kindly pointed us in the direction of a Xat chat running a BOT 24/7.
Currently the BOT, which is still in beta, monitors the chat for spammers and foulmouthed users, guest-self’s you when requested, and also kicks/bans when appropriate.
The possibilities of such a BOT are endless. One could for example pre-program a list of commonly asked questions then let the BOT go to work (great for Xat’s help chats):
User: “Where do I get color codes?”
BOT: “http://tinyurl/x-tcolor”
The BOT could easily monitor your chat while you were away. Your own set of user defined “no-no” words could trigger automatic bans, kicks, and gags.
We have spoken with the owner/creator of said BOT and they plan on releasing a fully functioning version very soon on an “official chat”. No word on whether Xat will support and or implement such a service for the masses, but they are aware of it’s existence so we’ll just have to wait and see.
More information will be available on this just as soon as we see the new version released. Hopefully everyone will have a chance to see it in action.
Stay tuned!
Things have been slow and that “slowness” tends to get my wheels turning. I’ve come up (don’t panic, this isn’t happening that I know of) with two new ideas relating to the pricing and distribution of new powers:
Stay with me!
How it works: Xat releases a new power. Power is limited. Only 1 power per person. Price starts at 1 xat, and each power sold thereafter increases the powers price by 1 xat (or some other increment).
Pros:
- benefits those users that frequent Xat by allowing them to purchase early and cheaply; a great motivator to stay on Xat during power releases
- early adopters/purchasers would be able to make significant profit if they chose to sell the power once it became unavailable
Cons:
- you snooze you lose. Sorry… I just come up with the ideas.
How it works: Xat releases a new power. Power is visibly serialized (i.e. it has a serial number – don’t ask how, that’s for Darren/42 to think up *wink*). Like numbered ID’s, lower numbered powers would be worth more. Example, if I had purchased Purple #234, it would be less sought after and less valuable than Purple #001, or Purple #007, etc…
To make things more interesting, Xat could limit the power (for this example let’s say to 1000; at which point it would become unavailable). They could release #1000 first at 1000 xats then, each sale would increment the price by some number and decrement the serial # by one.
Example:
Purple #999 is 1000 xats
Purple #998 is 1100 xats
Purple #997 is 1200 xats
…
Purple #001 is 100,000 xats
Pros:
- benefits those users that frequent Xat, those that don’t have the bankroll to buy an Epic power, and those that do have the bankroll who are after the coolness factor (i.e. getting a low numbered power); a great motivator to both stay on Xat during power releases and to be actively checking the powers page
- early adopters/purchasers would be able to buy the power at a reasonable price, those that had their eye on the low numbered powers could wait to buy and make interesting profits when they chose to sell
- makes trading the power much more dynamic. Resale price would be set by the market and determined once the power has become unavailable.
Cons:
- you snooze you lose. Again, sorry…
Those are the ideas. Comment below or go straight to the poll!
Idea inspired by One thousand paintings.
We don’t ordinarily promote user power or smiley suggestions via our blog or Twitter feeds. In fact, other than promoting our own suggestion once before, on the off chance that Xat staff will stumble upon it, we promote exclusively and only on our homepage (feeling the build up?).
Today we break that rule (there it is!). XatBlogs user Charles has what we (our gut actually) think is one of the more interesting power ideas that we’ve come across lately.
Idea: Hide authored Xat smiley codes
Explained: Xat is full of talented smiley gurus (“Ten”, wonderful “Mihay” (Hi Mihay!), etc…). They spend hours of their time coming up with interesting smiley/power code combinations only to have them ripped by other users once they’ve published the idea. Anyone and everyone can simply mouseover the smiley and take their code. So much for their hard work and originality.
Charles’s suggestion puts the power of “Copyright” into the hands of each author. When activated, this new power would disable the mouseover text that is typically displayed to each user; in essence protecting the long hours that went into creating the smile in the first place. So, when you do finally create you Mona Lisa of Xat smilies, no need to worry, you simply activate your power and whamo! Curious eyes will be met with absolutely zilch, zero, zippo, nil, nada, and nothing (err, or maybe some clever graphic)!
If you’re still not convinced of the genius behind the idea… don’t vote… don’t do anything… but do remember… everytime you copy someone else’s smiley code, a kitten somewhere is sacrificed.
Xat staff was on xat.com/help this morning for “unscheduled testing” of new features and smilies.
Some of the few new smilies submitted to us from xatblogs.com user iJayy are:
contempt, fedup, horror, look, ribbon, spin, tipsy
All of which are currently viewable on the Xatworld smiley generator.
Those users lucky enough to be in the chat were witness to both user defined colored smilies AND powers, num with capital letters, the ability to add both hands and hair to things like pig (not just yellow smilies), and a few other things.
Pay particular attention to the blog posts streaming into xatblogs.com right now. Many people were able to take excellent screenshots of what was going on.
Stay tuned for more and try out the Xatworld.com smiley generator now while it lasts.
We’re trying something new here, lend us your eyes and bare with us for just a moment.
What we’d like to do is to regularly start posting ideas for new Xat features and powers, create a forum for Xatworld users to do the same, and draw more attention to the xat.com/vote feature – all right here on the Xatworld blog.
Our first request, really more of a feature request, is something that we posted back in May of this year; “the ability to SEE what powers a user doesn’t have”. With the exception of a few positive comments, it sadly went unnoticed.
We think that having the powers window not only display what powers you have, but also display those that you are missing, would be highly useful.
As it is, if someone asks, “Can you tell me what power I’m missing?”, one has to systematically go down the powers list comparing it to the users power list. How painful is that? :S
Here’s a screen of what we have in mind:
Guide:
Missing powers: faded out, no box
Powers that we have but not in use: no change (see Mod8 above)
Powers that we have in use: no change
That’s it!
Comment below and let us know what you think. If you’d like to support the idea more directly, please vote here by simply clicking on the number to the left of the idea.
Remember that the xat.com/vote feature can be used to suggest new powers, features, and also glitches. Help support Xat.com by using it!
