The numbers
A room holds the last fifty messages. Message fifty one pushes the first one out, and it is gone rather than paged away.
A room clears itself after twenty four hours with nobody in it. Not twenty four hours after it was made: twenty four hours after the last person left. A room used every day stays put, a room used once for an evening is gone by the following evening, and the name is free again for whoever wants it.
Optionally, messages can delete themselves sooner. Whoever opened the room can set a timer of one minute, one hour or twenty four hours, and from then on every message removes itself once its time is up. It is off unless somebody switches it on, and while it is running a small marker in the room shows everybody that it is.
What it is good for
A room that empties itself fits a conversation with an end. A client who needs to reach you during a job and not afterwards. An event where people want to talk during it and nobody wants a group chat surviving it. A handover between two shifts. A one-off group of people who are not otherwise in touch. A conversation about something you would rather not have sitting in an app for years.
The usual alternative is a group chat that outlives its reason for existing, and that everybody is too polite to leave. Here nobody has to leave anything. You stop opening the link and the room takes itself apart.
Setting one up for one occasion
Pick a name nobody outside the group would guess and put it after the address: klaklak.com/thursday-handover or klaklak.com/blue-sofa-viewing. That page is the room. Send the link in the invitation, the email or the message where you were going to explain the arrangements anyway. Everybody who opens it lands in the same place.
Because the address is decided by you rather than generated, you can write the link into a calendar invitation for next week and it will work when the day comes. Nothing has to be created first and there is nothing to keep warm in the meantime.
Where you have to be careful
Temporary is about time, not about secrecy. While the room is live, anybody who has the address can open it, so a short obvious name like klaklak.com/meeting is effectively a public room. Use something long and specific for anything that matters, and read how private a link-only room really is before you assume more than that.
The other trap is treating it as storage. People do sometimes drop a phone number or an address into a room and come back for it a week later, and by then it is not there. If something in the conversation needs to survive it, copy it somewhere else while it is on the screen.
What temporary means for us too
The messages we hold are the ones the room is currently showing. When the room clears, they are gone from the server, and there is no backup we can go back to. Alongside each message we log the time, the IP address and the nickname, which is there for dealing with abuse and is described in the privacy policy. Private one to one messages between two people in a room are passed between the two browsers and are never written down at all.
Questions people ask
How long does a temporary chat room last?
It clears twenty four hours after the last person leaves it, and it holds the last fifty messages while it is alive. A room somebody uses daily stays; a room used once is gone the next day and the name becomes free again.
Can I make messages disappear faster?
Yes. Whoever opened the room can switch on a timer of one minute, one hour or twenty four hours, and messages then delete themselves when their time is up. It is off by default and everybody in the room can see when it is on.
Can I get a conversation back after the room has cleared?
No. There is no archive, no export and no backup, so we cannot recover it either. Anything worth keeping has to be copied out of the room while it is still on the screen.
I need a temporary chat room for a client. Does this work?
That is close to the ideal use. Pick a name specific to the job, send the link in the same email as everything else, and talk in the browser with nothing installed on either side. When the job ends you both stop opening the link and the room disposes of itself.
Can I reuse the same room name later?
You can, but you may not be alone. Once a room has cleared, the name is free for anybody, so opening it again next month might drop you into a conversation between strangers. For a new occasion, a new name is safer.
Is the room really deleted, or just hidden from me?
Deleted. Once a room resets, its messages are removed from the server rather than archived out of sight. What outlives it are the abuse logs described in the privacy policy, which hold the time, IP address and nickname attached to a message.