Transgender Forum has operated a chat room on the Internet since we began operations in 1995. Our chat rooms have been a friendly meeting place for transgendered people to meet, learn, and help each other.
Our first chat room was a modified Perl script that we ran over at zoom.com. After several weeks it became so busy we were ordered to turn it off. We then moved over to "Susan's Place" for a while.
When Transgender Forum bought their own dedicated server, it came with a built-in chat room. We used this for several years. Near the end a very sick person discovered that they could send annoying JavaScript bombs to other people, and tormented us for a while. Since the company that wrote the server software went out of business, we had to come up with something new.
The answer was the program we use today, called MEOW. I wrote it from scratch and included security checks to prevent JavaScript viruses, among other problems. MEOW is an elaborate complex of Java servlets which work together to allow our members to communicate with each other, using simple browsers and interfaces, or more sophisticated ones.
Development of MEOW has not always been smooth. There have been bugs, both in the MEOW code and the underlying application server technology. Sometimes I feel like "the grim reaper" when I step into the room, as everyone dreads my announcement of an imminent reboot! We are continuing to fix bugs as they emerge and seek to improve the services MEOW provides.
Our most recent improvement is in the way we handle our members photographs. We now automatically scale the images to a standard size and compress them, making for much faster response. We are also looking at ways of improving security and at ways of reducing the problems caused by antisocial people commonly called Trolls. Trolls can be hard to stop, as we have found that requiring user names and passwords scares legitimate people away, while there is no other foolproof way of identifying people. We do have ideas and employ countermeasures, not all of which we publicly disclose.
We value the input of our users. To this end, I plan on holding a meeting in MEOW with everyone who is interested on Wednesday, October 4th, at 8 PM Pacific time. Please visit then if you can. If you cannot, you can send in comments and suggestions to me at jamie@tgforum.com.
If this works well, I may make a habit of this. In particular, I would like to hold a regular discussion session about the recent "Queen of the Nerds" topics from my column. MEOW itself seems like a good place to start.