Forums! The Musical

It seems this has been happening more and more frequently the last few days, where a player will exit chat only to be sent right back into chat. For example:

[PLAYERNAME] has left chat.
[PLAYERNAME] has joined chat.
[PLAYERNAME] has left chat.

I had this happen to me as well. I hit exit and it said I left, then it said I entered and I had to click exit again. If this has happened to you, please post your browser, OS, and whether you were using inline or popup chat. The more info we can get, the better the chance Gobb can find and correct this bug before he leaves for the states.

over here: Firefox 3.5.2, Mac OS 10.5.8, Popup

Most issues are easy to identify and fix, but this one is tricky because it only seems to happen very occasionally, and can't be reproduced intentionally.

I wouldn't be at all surprised this is in some way connected to the issue some people sometimes have starting the inline chat, so I'd like to include that particular issue as well as anything similar. If you have experienced any "weird" behaviour with chat, please provide as much detail as possible, for example:

Operating System and Version: (Windows Vista/MacOS 10.5.8/Ubuntu Linux etc.)
Browser: (Firefox 3.5/Safari 3.1.2/Internet Explorer 8 etc.)
Popup or Inline chat: Inline
Description of Issue: When I start chat, the window appears but the user list stays empty and I can't see any messages.
Additional information: Only happens occasionally (once a week or so) and usually works properly if I refresh my browser.

The more info we get on these issues, the more chance we'll have of being able to fix it. Theoretically, anyway.

Operating System and Version: Windows Vista
Browser: Firefox 3.5
Popup or Inline chat: Inline
Description of Issue: When I start chat, the window appears but the user list stays empty and I can't see any messages.
Additional information: Only happens occasionally, but won't work even when I refresh my browser or close my page.

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4.11
Browser: Firefox 3.5.3
Popup or Inline Chat: Inline.
Description of Issue: Chat doesn't load. at all. User list stays empty, there's no "Welcome back, Chachoregard" text or anything. I can't see what's going on, but chat is apparently still going, I just cant see it.
Additional Information: Chat DOES appear when it's in Popup Mode, though. So that's weird.

Chach... All the time?

Just made a slight tweak to the chat script that should hopefully get rid of that "left chat - joined chat - left chat" display. Let me know how it goes.

Gobb: It's not really ALL the time, but every week or two that it happens. It's weird, but like I said, the popup chat quickly fixes that.

It is weird, and I think it's a timing issue, ie. IF the chat form loads too slowly for the javascript, then the script stops, rather than checking again in half a second, which is what it's meant to do. Apparently the circumstances need to be *exactly* right for this to happen, which is why I can't replicate it in dev. It's definitely staying on the outstanding bugs list though, and I'll spend some serious time on it as soon as I can.