klaklak › How to create a chat room

How to create a chat room

There is no create button, because there is nothing to create. Put any name after klaklak.com and that room is there, waiting. This page covers the rest of it.

Open a room

The whole method

Go to klaklak.com followed by any name you like: klaklak.com/tuesday, klaklak.com/kitchen-table, klaklak.com/bookclub. That page is the room. You pick a nickname of up to eight characters when you arrive and you can type straight away. If you would rather not think of a name, leave the box on the homepage empty and you get a random one. Nobody has to approve anything and no account is involved at any point.

Choosing a name

Names can use letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, up to twenty four characters, and they are not case sensitive. Two things are worth knowing. A short obvious word like chat or hello is almost certainly already in use by somebody else, and you will walk into their conversation. And because rooms are reachable by anybody who knows the address, a guessable name is effectively a public room. If you want the room to yourself, use something long and specific rather than a single common word.

Sending the link

The address bar is the invitation. Copy it into a message, an email or a document, or open the share button inside the room to get a QR code for people sitting next to you. Everyone who opens the link lands in the same room and sees the same conversation. There is no invite list to manage and nobody needs to be added, which is the point of the whole thing.

What the person who opened the room can do

Whoever gets there first holds the moderator role, and keeps it even after the connection drops and comes back. That means deleting individual messages, removing somebody from the room and banning them from returning. There is also a per-room timer that deletes messages automatically after a set period, which is off unless you switch it on. Everybody, moderator or not, can ignore any name with one tap and stop seeing that person entirely.

What happens to the room afterwards

A room holds the last fifty messages and nothing more. Once nobody has been in it for a day it clears itself and the name is free again. There is no archive, no export and no way to recover a conversation once it has gone, so anything worth keeping has to be copied out while it is still on the screen. That is a deliberate design choice rather than a missing feature: a room that empties itself is a room nobody has to clean up.

Questions people ask

Is there a limit to how many rooms I can make?

No. A room costs nothing until somebody is in it and disappears by itself once it is quiet, so there is no reason to ration them. Make one per conversation if that suits you.

What if the name I want is taken?

You will simply join whoever is already in that room. There is no ownership of a name and no way to reserve one, so if you find strangers in your room, pick a longer and more specific name and send the new link.

Can I change the name of a room?

No. The name is the address, so changing it means opening a different room and sending the new link. The old one clears itself after a day of quiet.

Do I need to keep the tab open to keep the room alive?

Only for about a day. The room stays available as long as somebody uses it at least once every twenty four hours; after that it resets. Nobody needs to be present in the meantime.

Can I use this for a class, a meeting or an event?

Yes, and that is the use it fits best: a room for one occasion, a link in the invitation, and nothing left behind afterwards. Pick a name nobody outside the group would guess.

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