Do we really need to have it on the practice page?
Is it possible to shut it off somehow?

I just hit the little X and it went right off. Maybe someone else will know if there's a more permanent fix.

It's a bit annoying to see it pop up everytime. Yes, you can click the X but there must be a way to keep it from coming up.

In theory, the Olark chat widget stays closed until you leave Skritter and come back later. I'm not sure how well that works in practice.

It has been cool having it to talk to users, and it has some great features, but there are a few problems with it:

1) It's in the way on the practice page
2) It's expensive
3) It doesn't give us your usernames
4) It doesn't detect whether we're online very well
5) It seems to be messing up our site analytics.

I could fix 1) by turning it off there, and probably 5), but it still doesn't seem worth keeping at this point. So unless people really want it around, I'm thinking we'll end the experiment.

It disappears for a while, but certainly keeps coming back at least each time you switch pages.

Also if it's closed there's no way to get it back without changing the page. And when you pop it out into a separate window and then press the << button Chrome prompts with a "Confirm Navigation" message box with the word "false" and nothing else. And finally - when you get a message and it's popped up the main Skritter window changes title despite there not being any chat box in it. That's weird.

I think a kind of irc chat would be cool... like the live chats you did.

http://www.ajaxdaddy.com/demo-ajax-chat.html

Something like the above would work, but probably with an option for private messages / admin only messages.

I've got it showing usernames and not showing up on practice page. We may try making it an option and turning it off by default, so it's not in the way for those who don't want it to show up, but you could still get to it when you wanted.