Universal loss of global chat channels

The bug which I despise more than all others combined strikes rarely, but is devastating all the same. You'll be going along (usually in the middle of combat, or while zoning) when all of a sudden you lose every single global chat channel you're on. This wouldn't be such a big deal if you weren't the only op, or if every channel were public, or if the average human mind were better at remembering ten things instead of (as it is) seven. So channels with too many to quit and reform lose all of their ops but can't be reset, or you have to take the time to hunt down the op (if s/he still exists) and worst of all, you may simply *forget* what channels you're on. Another round of this bug just went around earlier this week, and I came down with a case of it.

I've lost 10 of my global channels (most of which are private) so many times that I really can't put a number to how often it's happened. After losing my operator spot (along with every other then active op) in a very large public channel during the i15 zoning global chat drops, it took three hundred and sixty six days before our inability to change the MOTD was cured by a person who'd just logged on for the first time in two years. This isn't a small bug with tiny consequences, this is a small recurring bug that takes "America Online with Drops" and briefly turns it in to "Drops." Once it happens, the players have to fix the problem themselves and Support has absolutely no way to help. Then those poor, poor people at Support have to put up with me petitioning the tar out of it. Here are ways that we can reduce the affects of this unwanted recurring "Feature" while also reducing the amount of angry mail Support gets.

1.) Create a "List" section within each channel, accessible by a "List" option offered by clicking on the channel name in chat windows. Once opened, have two categories appear in the "List" option window: Operators, and Guests. Have an "Add" option for each, where @handles can be typed in manually whether the person is online, offline, in the channel or not. These are "Permissions," basically. So if you put @whoever in the Operator list and they join the channel, *they automatically become an operator.* If you put @whoever in the Guest list and your channel is private, they have permission to join your private channel at will.

2.) Give players a "Global Chat Channel invites" list that shows which chat channels they *can join* if they so wish, and what their status (guest/op) is on each channel. Kind of like bookmarks. You can only look at one website at a time but can bookmark a lot more than one - this would allow us to keep tabs on 10 chat channels at once, while bookmarking [however many] more.

3.) Make it so that in order to delete Chat Tabs and/or Global Chat channels from your selection, you have to type in their name (case sensitive) like with character deletion.

You do these three things, and chat tab/global channel loss will become a minor nuisance requiring five minutes to recover from instead of a major inconvenience requiring 525,600 minutes to recover from. Which is ridiculous.

The global chat server can and does drop. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have lost the channel.

Don't panic, don't try to reform the channel. Wait until the global server comes back up and *then* check.

The client should reconnect to the global chat server automatically; sometimes it doesnt but you can force a refresh.

Type /chatsave on a character where you have the chat channels set up the way you like them. Then type /chatload when there's a drop. Everything should pop back up to normal, if the global chat server is live.