Chat

OWOT worlds have the option of having a simple chat which can be found at the bottom-left of the screen by default. Usually when a user refers to chat, they are referring to the chat found on the main page.

The OWoT chat has two tabs: one for the world the user is currently on and a global chat which can be accessed from anywhere.

Notable chats

Frontpage Chat

Removed in 2024.

Global Chat

Accessible on all worlds, the primary chat after Frontpage Chat was removed.

Goatway

A series of bots that mirror chat messages to Discord, and that allows users to send messages to chat from Discord.

Currently, the most popular Goatway script is hosted in a Discord server by Falling1.

Chat culture

Anons

The anons of OWOT chat are infamous for being toxic.

History of chat

Introduction of chat

The OWOT chatbox was introduced in March of 2018 with /changelog/4. At the time chat was intended to merely be a secondary feature, with FP incentivizing people to continue having conversations on the canvas. In the years to come, however, more and more users would come to see chat as the primary form of interface with the community. It eventually got to a point where a significant portion of the userbase(including FP) supported its removal, citing the fact that it distracted too much from the canvas, which is supposed to be the main draw of OWOT.

Updates to chat functionality

Updates included in /changelog/6(December 2018) allowed users to drag the chatbox around their screen, while /changelog/8(March 2020) allowed them to resize it.

In ???, the button for opening chat was changed from its original dark blue color to the transparent grey of most other UI elements. This was met with some amount of backlash from users, though most have since accepted this change.

Resizable and draggable chatbox

Removal of Frontpage Chat

On February 16, 2024, FP announced that "after internal discussions", the front page chat would close down from March 10 to March 17 when they would decide either to restore it or keep it disabled. The fate of global chat or chats on other worlds were not elaborated on.

On April 29, it was removed permanently again. Global chat remains; and people also still have the option to use fern's chat enabler, which routes chat messages through /w.