After a few days of work the new gr00pz chat system is now online and 'seems to be' working pretty much flawlessly. Theres a load of improvements over the chat found on Nintendo-Play which mainly include:

Full emoticon set
Skins emoticon set
Custom emoticon set (Now for all members not just VIP. 80 slots per user!)
This gives a possibility of upto 126 emoticons in any given chat room!

On a practical note, the new ajax chat now supports per line clearing. This means that upon hitting 50 lines of chat, the system will clear the top line, and add in a new one...There is no more 'mass clearing' of content as per Nintendo-Play!

A Kicking system has been implemented, which can be accessed by clicking on a users Avatar via the user list. The system is split into 2 parts:

Admins: Admins are able to kick a user on the fly. Each time a user is kicked they lose 1 respect. If a user gets down to -5 Respect they are banned from that site/subsite. An admin can however unban them should they wish.

Standard Users: Continuing the auto moderation theme, Any user is able to 'Vote' on any other user within the chat room by clicking an avatar. If a users rating falls below -5, they are instantly kicked from the chatroom, and will lose -1 resepect from their profile. Again....if a user falls below -5 they will be automatically banned!
This new system allows the whole community to fight against Spammers and trouble makers, giving an overall better experience....No more waiting for 'Mods to the rescue!'

The new chat should work fine in both IE7 and Firefox (Firefox has slightly faster performance however!), but remains untested in any other browser.

Technically it is faster, and more stable than any previous chat release.

Feedback is much appreciated,

Cheers,
Carl - Gr00pz Admin.