Caray, Caray!

Yesterday I created a chat room for the Destilando recappers. Just now I created chat rooms for viewers, too. Although I had only intended for them to be used during the gran finale, there's no reason people can't start using them now.

However, before anyone goes to check them out, I want to give some instructions, because frankly the chat room interface is not newbie-friendly.

1. When you first go there, you'll see a little sign-on window. If you're not already a regular Meebo user with a Meebo login, then IGNORE THIS WINDOW. You don't need to create a login/signin/signon to use the Meebo chat rooms. In fact, I don't even recommend doing so. Just wait for the chat room window to open. It might take a minute.
   
   
2. To silence the annoying stuff that's playing in the media window to the right, double-click the narrow divider between the text window and the media window.
   
   
3. Now type "hello" or something equally pithy and hit Enter. You will be prompted to enter a name. This will be the name that appears on the screen next to your comments. Go ahead and enter your name.

Tips:

• To make all the text in the window bigger, do a Ctrl-Plus sign. To make it smaller, do a Ctrl-Minus sign. This works in Internet Explorer and Firefox. (Sorry Mac people - I'm not sure how you do this in Safari - it would be some type of zoom control.)

• Use the pulldowns above the text entry box to change your font, text size, style, and color, and to add smileys. Note that the text format controls (bold, color, etc.) affect all of your text, not just selected words. In other words, if you hit the big B it will make your entire comment appear in bold. It's not like in a word processor when you're highlighting a word and applying bold to just that word. (If the above makes no sense to you, don't worry about it.)

• Meebo seems to be optimized for Firefox (as opposed to Internet Explorer or Safari). This means that you might have some difficulties with the text controls.

• Meebo censors chat room profanity. There's no way for the chat room owner (me) to control this. It used to be really bad; if you typed "it's hitting me now" it would show up as "it'*****ting me now" which was both hilarious and vexing. It's slightly better now, but it still doesn't let you say "skank" which I consider pretty mild in the universe of unkind words. The thing is, if you enter some profanity you won't see that it was censored, but everyone else will. That is also pretty vexing.

These tips ought to make the chat rooms much easier to use.

To avoid spoiler conflicts, I created one chat room for the East & Central viewers (http://www.meebo.com/room/destilando_fin_east), and another for the West viewers (http://www.meebo.com/room/destilando_fin_west).

I'm a little confused as to how TV scheduling works in Mountain time. Do you guys watch at the same time as the east coast, the west coast, or do you have your own feed? If you need a separate chat room, I'll be happy to create one.

Labels: Destilando