We have been having some technical issues with the Chatbox (including, yes, it still isn’t back on the home page). We have a small number of users that have been having what can best be described as browsers “freaking out” and slamming the site pulling chatbox updates.
57% of our “hits” since January 1 have been chatbox updates, about 4.7 million hits. Of those 4.7 million hits almost 4 million have been two users :-). This isn’t the users fault but it is causing a bit of load issue on the site at times.
Short term to help improve this we have enabled load and idle detection. This means you will likely see the chatbox in “idle” mode when you first access it:
To fix this is easy. In some browsers a simple F5 or refresh of the page will “activate” the chatbox. Otherwise click the chatbox’s refresh button.
For now the Chatbox will go back to idle if you have been on the same page for more than 5 minutes. I hope most of you don’t sit staring at the chatbox all day.