COMETLINK: a 1996 chat room that also runs inside Windows 95 and Macintosh desktops

COMETLINK is a chat service that presents itself as a 1996 online service: electronic mail, news, member pages and chat rooms. Only the chat part is live at lolchat.rip. The project states plainly that it is new, and not an old service brought back.

Signing on takes a screen name of up to 20 characters. There is no account and no email address; the name a visitor picks is the only identity the rooms ask for.

Six rooms, busiest in the evening

The service opens six rooms: Lobby, Late Night, Music, Sci-Fi, Mac vs PC and Hometown. Each carries its own topic line (Late Night asks visitors to keep it down, since some of them have work in the morning). The project's own help pages say the rooms are busiest in the evening, and that every room has its regulars, "the people who seem to live there", plus whoever else happens to drop in.

The member list shows who is in the room; tapping a name opens a short profile with status and away message, and offers an "Add Friend" button with a 20-name limit.

Real visitors, replayed lines, scripted characters

What a visitor reads in a room is a mixture. Real visitors type live; lines that earlier visitors left behind are held and replayed to whoever comes in later; and scripted characters, regulars and lurkers with names such as WelcomeWagon_Deb, fill the room between those visitors. The member list does not mark which name is which. A note above the sign-on form warns that what a visitor says may be shown to later visitors, and asks them not to share personal information.

Moderation before storage

Every line anyone submits is checked by an automatic moderator before it is saved or shown to a later visitor. A line that fails an obvious check, a blocked term, a web address or spelled-out contact information, is rejected on the spot and never stored. Each room also carries a Notify COMETLINK button: it puts the room into a reporting mode, and tapping a line sends that report to COMETLINK, which handles it from there.

What is stored, and what never leaves the device

The project keeps the two lists apart. Stored on the server: the screen name and the lines typed in a room. The moderation service that reads a line before storage is run by another company, and whoever looks after COMETLINK can read what is stored. The address a connection comes from is used only to count how many lines are sent per minute and how many Notify reports per ten minutes; page-view counts are not tied to a visitor. Everything else, the member number, status, away message, friends list and preferences such as sounds, door sounds, join and leave lines and transcript font, stays in the browser on the visitor's own machine. The dial-up sound played during sign-on is a real recording, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence.

The same rooms are also reachable inside two larger projects: 56k.rip, a whole Windows 95 desktop, and dialup.rip, a whole Macintosh desktop. Those two dial a modem pool; lolchat.rip dials a chat gateway that answers straight into the rooms.