Multi-user chat with MSG
“Does MSG do multi-user chat?” is something we’ve been asked about countless times, and our response has always been no, and we’re not intending to add this feature, on the basis that many other clients already offer this functionality and we’re not here to reinvent the wheel.
Well, this is only partly true! The MSG web-client interface doesn’t offer the facility to create and join chat rooms, but the server that MSG runs on does (OpenFire Jabber server). This means that if you have an account on our MSG server, you can log into this account with another Jabber compliant client, which does have chat rooms.
Liam and I have been trying this out this morning using the Pidgin client (he’s also just had a meeting with few people using it) and all seems to be running well, these are the steps you need to go through…
- Create account on MSG (use the register link)
- Install Pidgin and connect to the msg server (msg.open.ac.uk) using you rnew username and password
- From the ‘Buddies’ menu in pidgin, select ‘add chat’
- Create a name for your room (only seems to like alpha-numeric characters, so no spaces)
- Fill in the options you want, or just leave on the defaults
We found the ‘invite’ function a bit flaky (didn’t track down the exact cause or where it was going wrong), but you can just give people the name of the room you’ve created for them to join.
Any feedback/comments etc welcome 
