Forreal why do we have chat? U have to keep refreshing, its faster to msg, u have to ask to chat, & when guys send me a request & i say yes it always says user is not in chat room.... so what was the point?

I perfer messaging myself. I dont like the chat.

Chat is a pain in the b..u..t..t on here tried it a couple of times and didnt like it just like u said had 2 push refreshing button all the time and it said user not in chat room! ;p-

I just did not like it i just chat in here lol

Exactly what i do!! lol

Yep it aunt anything better then here

I only pressed "chat " button ONCE just to try how it works .....Good thing the person i chatted with was his first time too...:D

Lol i just tell people that i do not like talkin on that lol

The original idea of the chat was to give our users a free (and anonymous) alternative to SMS/text messages. Keep in mind that in order to SMS with someone, you need to reveal your phone number to them, which is not the case with our chat. So we stopped auto-refreshing a while ago and let the users control the refresh.

Regarding the chat function itself, we actually had it auto-refresh at the beginning, but that created 2 problems: 1) it created a ton of wasted resources on the server because the chats would refresh even when there was no new message to show , and 2) if a person was in the middle of writing a chat message and it refreshed automatically, they lost the message.

Also, the reason it says "User is not in chat room" at the beginning is because when you invite someone to chat, you don't go directly to the chat room, because otherwise you would be forced to sit there waiting for the other person who might not actually be available to chat at that moment. So when you invite someone to chat, you get a Status Bar message advising you that you are waiting for a response to the chat invitation, so that you can continue navigating the site in the meantime. When the other person accepts your invitation, they go directly to the chat room, and your status message changes to say your invitation has been accepted with a link to the chat room. This is why the person that was invited, is always the first person to enter the chat room. I can see how this can be confusing, so it might actually be best if we removed the "User not in chat room" because it can give you the false impression that the user who invited you has left, when in fact they haven't even arrived yet.

At any rate, the problem with doing a proper chat function on a mobile site (at least at the beginning) was that too many mobile phones did not work properly with Javascript (or Flash), which are the main technologies you need to do a proper "real-time" chat like we are all accustomed to on our computers. Furthermore, the real-time nature of chats take a serious toll on resources because the chat function (especially if done in real-time) requires constantly polling the database for new messages, which gets very demanding when you multiply that across several different chat rooms. So even if the Javascript-compatibility weren't a limiting factor, the costs of a proper chat system would be.

All that said, the chat room hasn't really been a priority for us because, as you've correctly pointed out, there is a "good enough" alternative to it on mobile phones, which is SMS/text messaging. Perhaps we'll add a proper "real-time" chat to the Premium version of the site at some later date, but it isn't currently in the works.

What I've always tried to do here from the beginning is program Dating.mobi for the lowest-common-denominator phone. This has the benefit of ensuring the site works pretty much on all mobile phones (even low-cost or old phones), with the downside that it isn't the sexiest and most advanced site out there for users on more advanced phones. But I figured it was more important to have more people on a dating site, than more bells and whistles, so I decided to keep things a simple as possible.

Hope this helps explain things a bit more. :)

I only use it once just to see how it works & to me it's just as good as using my regular email I.M. Both have to be refreshed.