[live web week 2] chatroom to dispel loneliness

Well this might be the homework assignment that resulted in the strangest experience for me. I did the assignment to spruce up the chat page and run it on a server in the cloud, and tested it with myself in different browsers when I was done (screenshot above).

Then I did something that was probably not advisable, which was tweeting the URL out to the public.

Suddenly, it got interesting:

I hadn’t even considered what would happen if there were multiple people on the page chatting at once, but as some indeterminate number of people joined, it became this sort of intimate anonymous chat room.

Then, people started doing things that I didn’t even know was possible:

(It turns out not disabling HTML/Javascript in the input box allows people do to….a lot of things.)

I’m not sure how many people were on the page or even who they were, but it was fascinating and felt really poignant to me. I didn’t expect to have created this strange little portal on this Tuesday evening.

I decided to shut it down before someone did something to ruin the nice experience:

URL: http://162.243.91.198:8080/

https://gist.github.com/nicolehe/2f3b63da25b250ad850b.js