Hans van der Kamp

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I hate chatting. Maybe four or five times in over ten years I chatted with people and felt good after I left the channel. On two, or three occasions it was even quite romantic. But usually I curse any channel, page or application that invites people to associate in a way that borders on masochism. It is so tiring, even if you have all ten fingers available, practiced to the bone.
Chatting reminds me of scuba divers who have to yell through their masks to reach each other even when they are two inches apart. Mostly they have to use sign language with it to really be understood.

A Webmaster of another erotic oriented site asked me if I could supply him with a good chat script. Very important to him was the ability to kick out unwanted visitors. I had no idea and asked somebody else to think about it for him.

If you run a website and you hate chatting you should not set one up.
Of course I did not obey that golden rule. In 1996 I started a page with a script that would enable people to post remarks. Today we would describe such a page as a guest book or a graffiti wall.

Sometimes it is quiet for days and then suddenly somebody posts a remark. With a little luck somebody answers within seven hours and rarely, most rarely the chat gets the better of the users and there are actual conversations going on, albeit with 30-minute intervals.
That is not a chat. You will have to agree with me on this.
It is not due to the amount of visitors. There are hundreds of people a day just looking at that page without undertaking any action. Understandably.

So over the years I tried to introduce new formulas, new scripts, new features, but AMEA regulars always wanted to return to the old page. Most of all they missed the Dancing Girl on the old page, a seven year old animated gif, constructed from pictures of a nude model photographed from all angles, made in the 1930′s.

To start a good chat somebody has to be there 24/7 to answer any chatter entering. You have to keep that up until there are enough returning visitors. I cannot handle that.

A good Administrator from a successful chat site once told me that my theory was only partially true. There was something more to a chat. A chat had to be censored. The more Ips of unwanteds you could block, so he told me, the better your crowd could grow.
I was listening, frowning, and utterly uninterested.

Still, it happens. At times somebody in the chat really disturbs me. In psychology this interaction would be considered promising, interesting at least, but in my life there are enough disturbing things happening that this one particular person suddenly irritates me in a fashion that causes headaches, diarrhea, and morning sickness.

So, I shoot in the air. Once. Next time the irritation grows, I start telling the person I will block their IP if they do not leave. Today was such an occasion. I kicked out Bushranger.

Two quotes from the chat:

amea:
First Redneck in, first IP blocked. That is it, boys and girls. To quote that other person who forgot to do some body counting and told the world press to take a hike:
I have drawn a line in the sand.

bushranger:
steps over line and says ok

You have to admit: bushranger has got a nice and nasty sense of humour. I could not see it. I kicked him out today and he said sorry and farewell.
In ten years I rarely kicked somebody of the site and I felt bad afterwards. Childish. The good thing is that they always return after a month or two and soon I wonder why I ever felt guilty kicking them out in the first place.

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AMEA headquarters is moving for the second time this year. I am packing boxes, dusting cd-roms and I am creating a new ‘mission control’. My back aches and every muscle in my body seems to light up in the dark. The new place is five flights up and yes, there is *no* elevator. The latter is good for a person sitting at his desk 80% of his waking hours.

As much as I despise running up and down stairs with boxes, archive material, seats, and other collected trivia, there is one thing in life that I fear more in this business and that is moving servers. While paying bills for good old s2, our latest server, I never cease to worry if the company renting me that box is stable enough. Judging by what they charge, they should be doing fine. Moving servers is the worst that can happen. Files missing, databases corrupted, it can be an endless nightmare and I have gone through it several times, never stretched a muscle but I almost had to be hospitalised for severe mental problems. So, I try to avoid that at any cost.

So expect things to be slow in the coming three weeks. Almost as slow as my connection to the Internet, because for some strange reason I cannot move my adsl from one address to another, so I was forced to request a new connection. The red tape will take about 4-6 weeks. In the meantime my new provider is offering me a ‘free’ dial up connection. It has been stated before that old people don’t like change. For a while I was dreaming going back in time to an Internet as it was some 8 years ago. The days without the 2500 cialis and viagra emails in your inbox and the habit of good programmers, as Matt Wright, not to charge a penny for their scripts. (I still have his Perl Cook Book and I paid for it too, because I really wanted it. Unlike these licenses you have to buy these days, even though the scripting bought could best be described as Beta.)

But I forgot all about those dialup connections. So, my dream will fade for some time.

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