Chat Room

Returning members click here to enter the chat room.

Moderated Chat Schedule

Dr. Karen King, an alumnus and faculty member at CLU, will be monitoring the chat room on Thursday evenings at 9:00 PM EST.

We will plan for about an hour to begin, and we’ll all see what develops. So stop in with your questions or just to chat! We'd love to meet you there!

General Instructions

If this is your first visit to the chat room, you must register separately and create a special chat account in addition to your general CLU Online Community account. Click here to create your special chat account. Please keep in mind that passwords are case sensitive. PASSWORD is different from password, which is different from Password. If you have trouble logging in, be sure to check that first.

Topics discussed below

• What is an avatar?
• Important warning
• Finding your way around
• Joining the conversation
• Adding personality
• Why does everyone repeat themselves?
• Saying goodbye
• I still have a question!

What is an avatar?

In the registration form there is a space titled "Avatar." An avatar is a small graphic that is used to represent your likeness online. Most likely you will just leave this space blank. If you are interested, you may upload a small graphic to the internet somewhere and then enter the address of this graphic in the Avatar field of your profile. This avatar graphic will then be displayed whenever someone views your chat profile. There are free sites where you can host an avatar graphic such as ShutterFly.

Important warning

Once you have logged in to the chat room, please be sure that you do not click the "Back" button on your web browser. Doing so may cause you to leave the chat room or become invisible to other members and/or unable to type messages in the room.

Finding your way around

After logging in, simply choose a chat room to enter (there may be only one listed). Once in the room, you will see the list of other members who are in the room along the right-hand side of the chat window. Clicking on the triangle next to a name will allow you to perform several functions. You can choose to ignore a member, view their profile or send them a private message. The private message function is not reliable, so use it at your own risk!

Joining the conversation

To "talk" in the chat room, simple click your mouse in the large text-entry box at the bottom of the chat window, type your message and press the Enter (or Return) key on your keyboard. Your message will appear for the whole room to see!

Adding personality

If you'd like to add emoticons (Emotion Icons) to your message, simply click on the picture of the smiley face you want to insert. If you'd like to change the color of the text in your message, simply click on the color you desire from the spectrum displayed immediately above the text-entry box. You can also change the size of the text, as well as the font face by clicking on the appropriate options above the text-entry box.

Why does everyone repeat themselves?

You may notice that occasionally a message that someone types is displayed twice in the chat room. This is a known "bug" in the software, which will hopefully be fixed soon. In the mean time, you can try changing the Refresh Rate setting to see if this improves the situation at all.

To change the Refresh Rate setting, once you have logged into the chat room simply click on the Settings button at the top of the screen. This will open the User Settings page. The second setting down from the top of the page is Refresh Rate. Try either increasing this number to as high as 10, or reducing it to as low as one. Be sure you spend some time in the chat room to test the new setting each time you change it, to find out if it is an improvement or not.

Saying goodbye

To leave the chat room, click the "Logout" button.

I still have a question!

If you have further questions that are not answered here, please email Joshua Virkler at webmaster@cluonline.com.