Otay! After chatting with people, this simpler idea came out of the discussion: instead of one chat channel, two. One labeled "Game" and the other "General" or "Offtopic" or somesuch. IE, the second channel for general chitchat, the first for game-focused chat.

Sure, it's just words on a tab, but it seems that could help keep game talk focused on the games, and linux distribution discussions/arguments out of that

Welp, it's always easy to come up with work for someone else to do!

However, I had the thought of creating chat channels on the fly that are associated with each running game instance. These would be existent when the owner of the game is logged in and a game of theirs is running, and then shut down when the game is exited/they log off of .live .

I am a bit of a chatty bastard - I really enjoy watching people play, thinking about what they are doing, and chatting with people as they are killing and diving. But this means I can sometimes over-spam the main chat channel with my messages, which is uncool.

So, this brings up the idea of additional channels created that the observer is added to for each game they have added to their observe list. I envision that:

• there is only ever one chat channel visible at a time
• unlike main chat, joining a channel does not give you the last N number of lines for the game-instance chat you are joining, for privacy (ie, game instance chats, on the gradient of private<------>public, are somewhat less public than the main .live chat.

Whatay'all think?