Just a Chat Review

The giveaway is a page explaining chat commands and another explaining chat symbols, and a help channel written with a hash in front of it. This is IRC architecture wearing a browser: named rooms with a communal main channel, private one-to-one splits off it, and a syntax you are expected to learn. Almost nothing else in this corner of the web still works that way.

Rooms are counted on the front page — the adult and sex rooms in the thirties, the general free-chat rooms in the high twenties, roleplay and trivia in single figures — so the size of the thing is not being hidden. Text, voice, video and cam-to-cam are all offered without registration, download or payment, and moderation is claimed around the clock with a section of the page devoted to safety.

One room is still labelled Teen Chat, with an 18+ qualifier bolted on. The network states that it is now adults only, so the name is a survival from an earlier life rather than a description of who is in there — but it is the kind of leftover that ought to have been renamed rather than annotated.

Most of the rooms are not adult at all: cafe, singles, dating, trivia, country and language rooms. Treat it as a general chat network with adult rooms in it, not as a sex site.