Answers to commonly asked questions. Feel free to use
/suggest to suggest additions to
this document.
Yes, just enter the custom code (6-32 characters; letters digits
and hyphens only) and select "Join room". Alternatively, just
use the custom room code as the URL suffix,
e.g. https://ch4t.cc/custom-room-code. Once
people join, you can always use /lock to
prevent new people from joining.
This is website is designed to be used without an account, and
because there are no accounts, you will need to use
an alternate method to communicate the room code to
your contacts. You can either (i) create a room with a random
room code and then send them the link over email or SMS, or (ii)
create a suitable custom room code and then communicate with
your contacts the custom code and the time of the meeting. Once
people join, you can always use /lock to prevent
new people from joining.
If you switch to another browser tab, minimize the window, or (on a phone) lock the screen or switch apps, the browser may suspend the page and drop its connection. When you return, you are automatically reconnected as long as you come back within a grace period of about 120 seconds. After longer than that, you will need to re-join the room (or recreate it if you were the only person in it). Simply clicking another window while the chat tab stays visible does not disconnect you.
On Windows, Edge puts inactive background tabs to sleep (its
"sleeping tabs" feature, and a similar "efficiency mode" on
battery power) more eagerly than most browsers. A sleeping tab
loses its connection, so switching away for more than the usual
grace period leaves the room. If this happens often, tell Edge
to keep ch4t.cc awake: open
edge://settings/system, and under "Never put these
sites to sleep" add ch4t.cc.
Messages support a small set of inline Markdown styles. Wrap a span of text in the matching delimiters on both sides and the text between them is rendered with that style:
**bold** renders as bold.*italics* or _italics_ renders as
italics.***bold italics*** combines the two as
bold italics.__underline__ renders as
underline.~~strikethrough~~ renders as
||spoiler|| hides the text until it is clicked,
much as in Discord.`inline code` renders in a monospace font and
is shown verbatim, so no other formatting inside it is
applied.
The delimiter must sit directly against the text, so
* not emphasis * with surrounding spaces is left
alone, which keeps arithmetic such as 2 * 3 from
being misread. To show a delimiter literally, put a backslash in
front of it, so \* displays a plain asterisk. This
formatting is purely visual and is applied when the message is
displayed; the underlying text is sent as you typed it.
Yes. The /theme command applies a built-in design
in one step; the choices are artemis,
galaxy, mountains, and
flowers. Run /theme to list them,
/theme flowers to apply one, and
/theme reset to clear it. For finer control, the
/css command lets you set your own CSS rules, which
take precedence over a theme; run /css examples or
see the CSS examples guide for
a walkthrough, including the built-in theme fonts you can apply.
All of this is local to your browser and stored only on
your device, so peers never see your customizations, and the
theme fonts are served from ch4t.cc itself rather than a
third-party font service.
Individual text messages are capped at 512 characters, shared images and PDFs at 10 MB, and GLTF models at 100 MB.
Type /gltf in a room to open the 3D viewer in a
panel beside the chat. Use the file chooser at the top of the
panel to load one or more .gltf or
.glb models (up to 100 MB each). Everyone in the
room sees the same models, and any changes you make to them.
Moving the camera (your viewpoint) is separate from moving the objects. Drag on an empty part of the view to orbit around the scene, and scroll the mouse wheel (or pinch on a touchscreen) to zoom in and out. Dragging with the right mouse button pans the view. If you tick "Sync camera with peers", everyone in the room follows your viewpoint.
Moving an object works much as it does in 3D tools such as Blender, which is not obvious if you have not used one. First select the object by clicking its name in the list below the buttons. A set of coloured handles (a "gizmo") then appears on the object. Click "Move", "Rotate", or "Scale" to choose what the handles do, then drag a handle:
Dragging a handle moves only the object, while dragging anywhere else still orbits the camera. Click "Deselect" when you are finished editing an object. Object changes are always shared, so everyone in the room sees the model move, rotate, and scale as you do it.
When a call is initiated, the browser may need to ask for
permission to use the microphone. If the call is working
correctly, the bottom half of the message input bar is used to
indicate the outgoing audio level, and the top half is used to
indicate the incoming audio level. If you're still having
trouble, use /suggest and let me know what
hardware and browsers you are using, what sort of audio setup
you have, and what you are seeing and I'll try to fix it.
The Bandwidth figure shown next to your name in a
chat room reports how much relayed traffic the room has used so
far, out of a fixed 100 MB cap.
Where possible conversations on this site are peer-to-peer: messages, shared files, and call audio normally travel directly between participants over an encrypted connection and never pass through the server. This peer-to-peer traffic is not counted as part of the bandwidth limit.
However, some networks (such as those behind restrictive firewalls or symmetric NATs) will not permit a direct connection between two peers. In that case, communcation has to be relayed through ch4t.cc. Because that traffic flows through the server, it consumes server bandwidth, and it is this relayed traffic that the counter accumulates.
The server tracks the combined relayed total across everyone in the room. When that total exceeds 100 MB, the room is closed and all participants are disconnected. Starting a new room resets the counter.
The counter samples each connection every couple of seconds, so it may lag a moment behind live activity.
This is typically something set by your internet service provider and is not under your control, but you may be able to use a VPN to ensure direct peer-to-peer traffic.
Potentially yes, even through a VPN, depending on how your VPN
works. There are a few complexities behind how VPNs work (split-
vs. full-tunnel and IPv4 vs. IPv6), so ch4t.cc
cannot guarantee that your real IP address stays
hidden. This same caveat applies to every internet site you
visit (not just ch4t.cc), since initiating
WebRTC and STUN requests does not always require human
intervention (depending on your browser).
Note that
ch4t.cc never uses a third-party STUN or TURN
services, so the connection does not involve an outside
provider.