10 Years of Just Chat

23 March 2000 – 23 March 2010

Wow.

To be honest, I can’t believe that Just Chat is now 10 years old. We’ve come a long way, and even now Just Chat is still growing. The first two months of 2010 saw visitors up by 25% compared to the first two months of 2009. For such an established website, this is a truly amazing statistic.

I started Just Chat shortly after I went online for the first time. I still remember connecting to the first online chat room I found and being totally amazed that I could talk to someone on the other side of the world so easily. At the same time, I was frustrated at the number of chat sites that forced you to register a huge amount of information in order to access their site – which you often found empty after you’d jumped through all the registration hoops.

Just Chat started as a site that simply listed links to chat sites that could be used without registering. Over time, our traffic grew and I started to think that sending so many people away to other sites was a wasted opportunity. Therefore, I put up a chat room on Just Chat – and that is when I consider this site to have been officially ‘born’.

Our first chat room was shared with a number of sites – this had advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it meant that most of the time, there were people logged in and chatting (a critical advantage when running a chat site!). On the down side, I had little control over the chat room itself and it was almost impossible to set and enforce our own rules.

Therefore, after a couple more months we launched our very own chat room – which held a maximum of 25 chatters. The problem was now one of numbers – if people logged in and saw nobody around, they’d just log out again. I remember sitting logged into that chat room for hours every day and engaging in conversation with every person that logged in to make sure they stuck around long enough for the numbers in the chat room to build up.

This process went on for a number of weeks. We got a great crowd of regulars in the chat room and our traffic continued to grow. Soon, I couldn’t handle things on my own and we started to recruit Chat Guides to provide a friendly face for chatters, and to enforce our site rules (which remain largely unchanged since 2000).

As our traffic grew, we expanded to a chat room that could hold 100 chatters. We then had to double that to 200. Soon after, we had to expand again.

Today, Just Chat has three general chat forums which each hold up to 200 chatters, as well as the new VIP chat forum. This gives us a capacity of over 600 simultaneous chatters – and most nights, we are very close to reaching full capacity.

Of course, Just Chat isn’t just about the chat rooms. We also have the message boards – the cause of much stress, laughter and sleepless nights over the years. I remember launching them – the community was split over whether they would be used. After a couple of days it was clear that they would, and that they would have huge importance to Just Chat.

The boards have seen more than their fair share of arguments, controversy, lies and bans. There have been positive moments and there have been negative moments – but ultimately, they have made our community richer and more vibrant.

Just Chat also has an email penpals section – which now has over 16,000 members. These members have written over 300,000 messages to one another. This just blows my mind.

Just Chat has been more successful that I ever could have imagined. I think the reason for this success comes down to two key points:

1) Our users – each of you add something unique to Just Chat. Friendships, cliques, quarrels, fights; you are the people that make Just Chat what it is today.

2) Our Chat Guides and Forum Hosts. Our staff do a tough job with very little thanks, and face a lot of criticism. However, the fact remains that if our Chat Guides or Forum Hosts weren’t around, our chat forums wouldn’t be as successful or attractive to visitors as they are today.

In conclusion then, let me finish by saying thank you.

Thank you to all of you who make Just Chat what it is today. Thank you to all of you who welcome new visitors to the site. Thank you to all of you who prefer to try and diffuse conflict or ignore arguments rather than make them worse. Thank you to all of you who aren’t afraid to share your opinion!

Thank you to every Chat Guide and Forum Host – past, present and future. You keep this community together when at times it has seemed as though it was going to pull itself apart. Every staff member has influenced the development of Just Chat and played a part in its success – for absolutely no monetary reward. Now that’s what I call true passion and enthusiasm.

So what does the next 10 years hold? Will there be a place for online chat rooms in the future? I think there will be, and I am confident that Just Chat will still be around in 2020 in one form or another.

People are social. We’ll always want a place where we can meet new people and chat with others. We already have a fantastic community, and this will only become stronger over time. I think there will always be a place for Just Chat – and that is entirely due to people like you joining and contributing to our community.

Thank you.