Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, Mac 101
Mac 101: Auto-join rooms in iChat
Welcome back to Mac 101, our series of tips for new and novice Mac users.Earlier today we saw a tweet that inspired this post. Patrick Burleson asked how he can stop iChat from automatically joining chat rooms he visited during an earlier session. It's possible, but you won't find the fix in the preferences.
First, I'll describe how to join a room automatically whenever iChat is launched. From the File menu, select Go To Chat Room.... A window appears. From there, select the correct account and add your room to the Room Name field. Next, click the "+" in the lower left-hand corner to add it as a favorite and select the "Autojoin" check box. Now, iChat will join that room each time it's launched.
To disable the autojoin, simply de-select that box. Why would a person want to automatically join a chat room, you say? Some folks collaborate with far-flung coworkers via AIM all day.
There you have it, Patrick (and TUAW readers). I hope this helps.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Patrick Burleson said 7:53PM on 9-23-2009
Thanks Dave! Unfortunately, that's not exactly what I was talking about. What I meant was, when I start iChat back up, a window opens up with chat sessions with everyone I was last chatting with. So if I was chatting with you and TJ, then I would have a window with both of you in it. It doesn't seem to matter even if I close all my chats before quitting. Maybe I need to nuke my iChat preferences.
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kiyoseryu said 9:05PM on 9-23-2009
Can you let us know how to do this in Adium on a jabber network?
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Just_a_guy said 1:06AM on 9-24-2009
I use this feature to connect to chat rooms I frequent. it makes it so I don't have to put in user names and passwords for each room.
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untmdsprt said 4:59AM on 9-24-2009
So where does one find rooms to meet new people? I've already looked online for webpages that gave a list of rooms, but to no avail. Most are so outdated you wonder if anyone still uses iChat or have they gone to Skype.
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Heimbachae said 8:36AM on 9-24-2009
I joined the "bored" chat room this morning just out of curiosity, and i got booted within a MINUTE. my only comment was "there are still chat rooms!?" and BOOM i'm out.
anyone know of any decent chat rooms not ran by tools?
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lostgame said 9:26AM on 9-24-2009
Hey, I dunno if you guys read these comments or not, but I think it would be pertinent to write a Mac 101 about using Jabber to set up an MSN service for iChat - while there are many tutorials like this online already, the vast majority of them are circa 2004-2005, and both iChat and the Jabber clients have changed drastically since then.
In places like Europe and Canada, this is especially pertinent, as the vast majority of people use those services instead of AIM/Yahoo/etc - and some of us prefer iChat over, for instance, Adium.
If you guys would like, I'd be willing to write the article myself, but I think it's important to get an updated tutorial out there regardless, and this seems like the perfect place to put it.
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Daniel Indradjaja said 3:05PM on 9-24-2009
Yes please lostgame... at least PM me if no one else is interested