Ten years of fun and banter at JustChat

Martin has sent me yet another shipment of Monkey glands, to enhance my memory, and asked me to kick over my Zimmer frame and spend a few minutes reminiscing over the last 10 years, so here goes….

I first started using JC late in 2000 when it was a relatively small chat site (my user name then was “Bear”). The original forum could only hold some 25 chatters at one time – JC has grown ever so slightly since. JC was one of the first chat sites on the internet to allow chatters to sign in and chat without having to ‘register’ beforehand.

There were loads of wind-ups and banter and some pretty heated debates / discussions. It was about then that the now generally accepted internet rule came into being – if you accused somebody of being a “Nazi” you automatically lost the argument.

Things went from bad to worse and then to absolutely awful, but I found it increasingly difficult to take all this stuff seriously and developed a thick skin coupled fine line in irony. My sense of humour has always been my downfall and so it unfortunately brought me to the attention of the ‘powers that be’. I was invited to become a ChatGuide – which just goes to prove that even clever people can make mistakes sometimes.

Fresh from my training course in late 2001, I emerged as ChatGuidePB, bright eyed and bushy tailed and eager to set about bringing order to chaos. This task is still a work in progress!

We had around 10 Guides back then, some were active, some were less so and some were utterly moribund. Somehow or other we managed to maintain the high standards of the site – a classic example of poacher turned gamekeeper.

Over the last 10 years we have had a whole alphabet of ChatGuides ranging from A to Y – we never managed a ‘Z’ – each one of whom made their own unique contribution to JC. Some I can remember with absolute clarity, some less so and a few really did stand out from the rest.

One Guide memorably got totally pissed and went into an internet café, signed in as Staff and stumbled around for a bit trying to chat in what passed (for him) as a coherent style. Problem was that everybody else soon spotted his condition and played him up accordingly. He eventually left in a huff and went back to the pub.

Problem was that he forgot to sign out (as a Staff member) and the next person to use the computer found themselves with a golden opportunity!

Suddenly the ‘Guide’s’ conversation changed from incoherent ramblings to a clear and concise dissection of each chatter’s personal habits. Unfortunately they then discovered the eject button and set about booting chatters for, amongst other things, using the word “the”. Confusion reigned yet again and it took several hours to sort it all out.

A female Guide joined us and was trained (as all Guides are) but decided that she was going to thoroughly clean up the chatrooms single handed. As you might anticipate, the more she insisted that chatters behave themselves – the less they wanted to do so.

Eventually she flounced out of the room in a rage and set about booting every chatter from the entire Forum. This went on for a good couple of hours and The Pub had never been so empty. MSNs buzzed; mobile phones rang incessantly; until eventually another Staff member was found who could come into the Forum and dissuade her from booting all users on sight.

Husband and wife Guides presented us with their own unique problems; as long as the marriage was ‘happy’ then all went well. But if there were any marital issues inevitably these spilled over into the chatrooms. Hubby would flirt with another female user; wife would go mad; and a huge row would develop, much to the amusement of the other chatters. This eventually led to us not accepting husband and wife Guides. Chatroom moderators? Yes. Marriage guidance councillors? No way!

We were also frequently entertained by the ‘fake couple having a row’ ploy. A chatter would sign in twice, once with a female name and once with a male name, and then proceed to have a blazing row (with themselves). They were unaware that Staff could easily see that both user names originated from the same computer and indulged themselves in some really bitter rows.

Naturally all the female chatters in the room sided with the ‘female’ and the male chatters with the ‘male’. It took only a few minutes for the ‘couple’ to have the whole room in an uproar – much to the amusement of Staff who had to play along with the charade.

Chatroom ejection (or ‘booting’) has always been a thorny issue. Over the years I’ve noticed that chatters are only ever booted for “no reason”. Strange that eh? I can’t remember a single occasion where a complainer has told me that they were using inappropriate language or an dodgy user name. Still, we live in hopes.

I got booted once by Martin (ChatHostUK), right in the middle of a training session. I was demonstrating the use of the ejection facility to the trainees when he got slightly over-excited and booted me out of the training session. He later apologised and said that it was a complete mistake. Problem with computers is that you can’t see if someone is grinning when they type something!

Chatters frequently wanted to be able to boot other chatters, especially if they were irritating. The standard response was to instruct them to press Alt + F4 and then watch with glee as they unexpectedly left the room. One (female) chatter took many months to catch on to this and repeatedly booted herself and then came back complaining that the system didn’t work. It’s pretty tough to keep a straight face sometimes!

Thinking back over some of the memorable wind-ups in the last decade or so, a couple particularly stand out. We had the infamous (and some might say inevitable) internet ‘death’ hoax. This is where a chatter establishes an ‘identity’ so that everybody ‘knows’ them and then tells people that they are suffering from some dreadful terminal illness. Often this is done by an alleged ‘friend’ or ‘family member’ who just happens to come online to tell us all of the terrible fate that is about to befall a JC chatter.

This inevitably provokes mass public outbursts of wailing and grieving with people alleging that they sat and cried all day and so on. Sales of Kleenex tissues rocket and numerous candles are lit ‘in memoriam’.

Enter the more cynical (or experienced) chatroom users who point out that this is a hoax and they’ve seen it all before – and off we go with yet another huge row. The most famous (or perhaps infamous) chatter to pull this stunt caused a huge message board row with over 20,000 hits on their ‘death thread’ and single-handedly managed to polarise the entire site into believers and non-believers.

My personal favourite was the user with a female name (who I later on discovered was in fact a male!) who sat quietly in the chat room for a while before announcing that her baby had been ‘snatched’ by the social services that day.

This provoked the question “why” and after much persuasion ‘she’ told us all that she had been involved in a traffic accident whilst pushing her baby along a pavement. Apparently somebody reported her to the SS and they came along and took her baby away.

As you’d anticipate, all the females in the room went ‘onside’ immediately and she spent the next half hour basking in feminine support. Gradually she slipped into the conversation more ‘facts’ and so her ‘story’ became progressively more bizarre – but still the female chatters were 100% on her side.

It ended up with her saying “….so they took me to Accident and Emergency for treatment and when I was put in a bed I looked over and saw, in the bed next to me, my rapist. I recognised him as the man who had raped me several months ago.”

This, as you can imagine, brought the entire chatroom to a state of utter outrage.

Unfortunately for me, I chose that moment to suggest that the whole thing was a very clever wind-up (it had been going for nearly 2 hours by then) and without exception the entire room turned on me and ripped into me in a major way.

It took weeks for the furore to die down and to this day there are still chatters who believe the story. I did eventually discover who the male was behind this wind-up (you know who you are) and offered him my congratulations for a superb and most convincing performance.

So there you have it. JustChat is 10 years old and still going from strength to strength. We started with a maximum of 25 users online and one Forum in 2000, to having up to 600 users online in four forums ten years later.

Over the last decade hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) from all walks of life have used our site; have found old friends and made new ones; and have enriched their lives in consequence. I am proud to have been associated with JustChat for all these years and hopefully will continue to be so for another decade.

If you have been, thank you for reading these reminiscences and continue to enjoy JustChat.

Best regards,