The only other alternative I have considered was to use one of the Hearme rooms instead of ICQ for the Radio as it is pretty stable, nearly everybody on FolkChat already has hearme insalled and it has the advantage of not being dependent on any one persons computer running. It does raise certain questions though:

Would people be content to just used the fairly basic text chat facility and resist the temptation to talk? I have the ability to limit talk time to 1 second to make it useless but can not disable it completely

A person does occasionally get booted from hearme for no apparent reason but there again, unlike the normal ICQ, to the best of my knowedge, no individual has got booted from Folk Chat but as with last week, if I crash, I boot everbody with me. Which is the lesser of the 2 evils?

There were some doubts about the compatibility between Hearme and Real audio and I know that Alison had several problems related to this. Does anybody know what the situation is? If having the 2 running does cause a crash, it is unworkable - worst scenario being MCR going down.

Hearme doesn't currently support Macs (but is planning on doing so) whereas ICQ does. Are there any Mac users joining the current ICQ chat or thinking of doing so?

I have said this before but I will repeat myself. I am just trying to provide short term solutions to enable a consistant method of communication both with the MCR and the song circles. The long term plan is in Max's capable hands.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Jon