This might not be doable with the current council fire set up. However I think it would improve traffic, and communication of qj's members. If when someone was in council fire it showed to the side (1 person chatting) I know the CCBB's chat room, and bwca.com's work this way. I think more people would visit council fire, if they knew that someone else would know they were in there.

I'm in.

If I remember correctly, that infomation (number in council fire) is "present" on the screen.  However, it is the piece that is not working (small window toward the top of the screen when you are entering your login name).  This gives the appearance of a Java (language) incompatibility that the designers of the chat room should be able to fix.

dd

It is what it is for now folks:
QJ's host has never supported and no longer offers that particular chat applet or any flavor of chat for any price these days. The old applet is still there and works OK for most but it looks to me like the host has blocked all access to the port required to cache the count. I expect they had a reason for doing so. I don't have root access to the server, and they have no interest in supporting chats so...

BTW - I recently discovered a similar problem with the site search that they corrected while I was on hold. The difference was they had an interest in making the search work as it's pretty speedy resource wise. The chat is too but I expect no one's paying the creators. Shhhh.

That said:
Displaying the names of everyone chatting is certainly do-able, as is archiving transcripts depending... In both cases, every visitor would share a bit of weight depending...

I'm basically clueless and learn by doing but the two eyes and three typing fingers I know best still prevent me from chatting. (Could be my brain's fault too I guess.) So, perhaps I don't quite understand why if someone felt like it, they wouldn't just log on and if they found themselves in there all alone, wouldn't keep the window open in the background and listen for the drip or ding or whatever sound it makes when someone logs in like the first person does on other sites.

If there was enough support for it, great, but I'm just not seeing it. I expect those that do/did, kinda know when to? I've not poked my head in there for a very long time so feel free to enlighten me.

QJ's host is "ending support for Volano online chat service beginning November 19th, 2008."

The thing I liked most about what is being discontinued is it required absolutely no attention from this web-lackey's perspective - not to mention no transcripts I'd need to archive.

While I used the chat five or six times years ago, the best were mostly mostly private chats. Get more than three people in there at one time and my three typing fingers became overwhelmed so personally, I wouldn't miss it.

The host suggested a number of third party options that could replace it so if a number of you guys..., speak up now.