Removal of chat

From March 10, 2024 to March 17, 2024, the frontpage chat was disabled.

The frontpage chat was disabled again indefinitely on April 26, 2024 following a wave of proxy swarm attacks.

Justification

For a long time, the chat served as the central community hub. With each coming day, the chat was subject to trolling and persistent spamming. These instances of trolling and spamming gradually eroded the chat's foundation and subsequently affected the reputation of OWOT. Instances of trolling included targeted harassment, and instances of spamming included Starianna's CP messages done using residential proxies.

Because of difficulties moderating persistent spamming and trolling, the frontpage chat had to close down on April 26, 2024 to preserve the reputation of the rest of the site and the wellbeing of the community.

Future Plans

There have been talks to disable the Global chat as well for the same exact reasons as listed above. Additionally, the persistent spamming has moved onto Global which creates the same crisis as previously experienced, furthering the need to close down Global as well.

A new feature will soon be released which lets groups of world owners create their own localized global chat.

Other

On May 3rd 2024, Poopman linked a script on canvas that tries to imitate chat using an embed of canvas. But because of how it worked people could just type over messages and replace what they actually said. The idea was scrapped very quickly, and nobody used it the day after it was introduced.

Screenshot of aforementioned script in action.

There were two versions of it, one that put messages below SOP and one that put messages at X: 83521, Y: 83521