Leaderboard

The chat being standalone is one problem because it pulls the user out of the "forum environment". That's easily fixed by just embedding the external page into a normal forum page, as I've already done. We, being both Charlie and myself, lack the permissions in the ACP to hide the "chat room" button in the main navigation and replace it with the "chat" button which is now hidden as a sub-item of the portal button. (The former page should keep existing, it should just not be visible in the navigation anymore, since that page is being embedding in the latter page) Another problem with the chat is the fact that the user needs to sign in before being able to use the chatroom. This is an extra step that bring accessability and user experience down by quite a bit since they already had to sign in to the forum to be able to use the chat room in the first place. The database access was to help make the connection between the chat and the forum. Althought I believe that we can find other solutions for this because as your said, direct DB access should be a last resort because of security reasons. Next is the look of the chat room which is a design that probably originates from somewhere around 2007-2010 I'd say. It works but it's not appealing and the controlls are rather bulky and distracting. We can fix this, no problem. The history of the chat should be removed together with the censorship. One of the beauties of the old chat was that you could say what you want when you wanted it without having to worry about anyone reading what you said at any point in the future. This encourages open discussions and deeper social connections. I would love to take a look at the API for the chat client and see what I can do with it to make some improvements. Of course in a team effort with Charlie and the others.