About Disposable Chat

The general idea

The purpose of the Disposable Chat site is to allow you to chat with other people without needing anything more than a web browser to do it.

The site is a little like IRC, but your rooms aren't necessarily as public, and it's a bit like instant messaging, except you don't all have to have accounts with GTalk, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber, or anyone else.

The idea is you turn up, create a room name (and with a password, if you like), you tell other people the room name (and password), and you start chatting away.

The service is free, and is designed to be as simple as possible to use, either for short, two person, five line conversations, or for longer ten person, thousand line conversations.

Who are we?

Basically, we're a couple of friends who are sufficiently anti-social that we spend spare time coding. We're both professional programmers, and basically we decided to create the site as an interesting exercise to keep us occupied outside of work.

We're not doing Disposable Chat for a living — we have other jobs for that. But we find it entertaining to work on as a side project.

If you want to contact us, you can reach us at this email address.

Disclaimer

Why should you care about who we are? You shouldn't. Surely you have better things to do with your time! But we suppose the implications of the above could be relevant to some people.

We don't see any reason that the site should crash frequently or go away, but we don't promise you that it won't, and we won't be held responsible if and when it breaks.

Please do not use in nuclear reactors.

Feature requests

Here are a few features we've thought of so far but not implemented. We might get around to adding some or all of these, or we might not. If you've got other ideas that you think might be of interest, then feel free to let us know.

• Clickable links
• Emoticons (smileys)
• Emailable transcripts
• Room renaming

FAQ

How secure are the passwords?

Not secure at all. Basically, the idea of using room passwords is just so that people can't guess a room name and turn up in the middle of your conversation. They're not used to encrypt anything (your chat messages are still sent to us in plain text, and stored in memory that way too), and the password you use will be visible in the URL and the HTML source of the chat room page.

Do not use any of your regular passwords as the password for a room on this site! If you do, don't blame us when other people discover your password!

Do you guys make any money off this?

Not at the moment, no.

What's the site written in?

Clojure (using Compojure) backend and JQuery for in-browser Javascript

Can you read our chats?

In theory, yes. We haven't implemented any encryption, so yes, we could read your chats. We don't see any point in doing that, though, and also, anything you say is forgotten once it's no longer needed. We delete entire rooms after 2 minutes after the last person leaves, and if there are more than 100 chat messages in a room, we'll forget all but that many messages (although we'll make sure to keep at least the last 30 seconds worth, for those who type real fast!).

We don't think you should be worried. We're not planning on reading any of your chats.