I've recently been teaching myself backend web development with Node.js and I've started practicing with a simple chatroom. You can find it here. There's no registration - your alias can be whatever you want on each post. My plan is to gamify it in some way, perhaps by giving the collective Internet a bunch of challenges (e.g. total posts, posts per minute, 26 consecutive posts listing the alphabet, etc). Then everyone levels up as one hive mind. This isn't a serious website or anything (it's called Yolo Swagalicious for crying out loud), so I'm happy to take on board your suggestions for fun challenges or ways to gamify the chatroom.

I also intend to use Bootstrap to make it look sexy. It would also be cool to scrape data from the messages collected and see if there's any interesting patterns in the collective drone of the Internet.

So... yeah, have fun chatting to nobody. And be sure to take the usual precautions when speaking to anonymous strangers on the Internet. You should be fine while it's devoid of actual people. I'll be moderating the messages and eventually filtering out stuff like URLs.

// TODO
Add cookie that remembers your last alias. DONE (but not on Microsoft browsers. Just... don't)
Wrap messages that are too long, rather than stretching the page. DONE
Limit messages from each person to something like 3-5 per minute.
Add "X is typing..."/"X people are typing..." message.
Add commands, starting with /help, which should be mentioned in the welcome message. DONE
Clearly differentiate between console messages and user messages. DONE

wow. even socialization has to be gamified these days. wowwwwww.

but of course

Ideas, more for general smoothness than gaming in particular though:

•If someone joins, it should say, "So-and-so has joined the chat." Same idea if they leave the chat.
•Timestamps so we know when messages were posted (and maybe also when people join/leave?)
•A list of who is online
•An away/not away button to signify if you are afk, I guess your name could be in strikethrough or something on said list?
•Ping! My wiki chatroom on Wikia has a little optional feature that makes a ping noise whenever your username (or whatever you want to be pinged for) is said in chat. Kinda neat, alerts you to the chatroom if someone wants to talk to you and you're in another tab.

I might think of other stuff too, I dunno. But this is a cool idea.

I think more the idea of this is that it is an anonymous chatroom than a typical chat client, though. Jebby would have to confirm or deny that suspicion though.

Timestamps added. Sadly, they will be the huge date strings on most mobile browsers for now. I have a nice fix for that using Moment.js, but that first requires me to figure out how to send more than one source file with Node.js. Derp. They're the shorter ones on desktop browsers though.

I don't like printing the times out on the same line as the message. That'll be changed when I start using super sexy CSS magic to make the messages look nicer. This will probably be done in conjunction with Bootstrap integration.

It would be nice to learn how to make a traditional chat client, but I never really intended for this to be one of those. It's basically an experiment to see what interesting things I can do with lots of messages received by anonymous strangers, preferably in a way that compels them to come back.

Regarding your third suggestion, I could add a stat for how many people are currently online that can be accessed via the command line. In fact, if I move to Bootstrap, I may ditch the command line altogether and have some kind of information panel. We'll see how it goes.

Figured out how to serve multiple files from the server. Actually just one line using Express.js. Meant I could use Moment.js to apply timezone-sensitive, locale-sensitive formatting to the dates. So they now appear consistently across all browsers, including mobile browsers. Next stop: prettify the website.

First phase of Bootstrapification applied.