TalkCity Is Worse Than... Review on Talkcity

There are a million things that I would rather do than chat at TalkCity.com.

1. Stand in the shower and shave my head with a cheese grater while chewing on tinfoil and bathing in kerosene.

The rest are inconsequential, as that pretty much sums up the full extent of my feelings towards this lame-assed chat server.

Several years ago, TalkCity was a great place to chat. That’s mainly what they offered: A free chat server where you could log on and go to various rooms with all kinds of different themes in order to talk with other people from all over the world. Eventually it all went to hell, and they added new features such as your very own (free) HomePage builder, but it still stinks regardless. Here’s why.

1. Software. You can login with their Java-based IRC client (EZTalk) for free. This takes several minutes to load, and very little space on your screen is devoted to actual chat space. The rest is filled with advertisement banners and other nonsense. If you’re patient enough to go through this nightmare, then you can follow several links to the channel you want to participate in - this is tedious and rather time-consuming.

A long, long time ago I could use MY chat software (mIRC available at mirc.com) to chat for free with TalkCity. With this software I could enter any chat room, remember my username and password, create popups and aliases (shortcuts), and program scripts to do anything I wanted from automatically displaying text to...well, the possibilites were endless. I had a lot of fun with mIRC, as it was very affordable, easy to use, and straightforward.

Then TalkCity got in a twitch because they claimed hackers were using mIRC to break into channels and do harm. So, they took away that ’’privilege’’ and said that chatters could either use EZTalk (yuck) or download a special version of another IRC software (pIRCh) designed just for TalkCity. pIRCh for TalkCity was a lot like mIRC, except that it was slower - and, as with EZTalk, more screen space went to advertising than to actual chat! This frustrated me to no end, so I removed the program from my computer and forgot about TalkCity - all the little chat friends I’d met on that server had my e-mail address and were on ICQ anyway, so it wasn’t any big loss on my part.

A few days ago, I logged into TalkCity just for kicks and discovered that they are now making you PAY for the ’’privilege’’ of using any software save for their EZTalk nonsense. You pay twelve dollars a year in order to use TalkCity pIRCh - while twelve dollars a year is VERY affordable, it is not reasonable. With all the crappy ad banners and sponsorships that TalkCity has gained over the past few years, I see NO good reason that they should CHARGE people to logon to their servers.

1. Rent-a-cops. If anybody sees ShaneCSA or AndrewCSA on TalkCity, tell them I still think they’re egotistical jerks. ’’CSA’’ means City Standards Advisor. They’re ’special’ users that run around TalkCity, banning and kicking users out of various chat rooms. They even invade private chat rooms and punt users, then close the room. They created the CSAs in order to protect children from harassment and other dangers, but going into MY private room, which is filled with other adults? Give me a break! I don’t need a fake cop looking over my shoulder to make sure my friends and I are playing nicely.

Sometimes TalkCity has authors and movie directors into their chat rooms in order to talk with fans. This would be nice, if I could ever get into these already-full channels in order to ’’meet’’ these people. It’s a nice little lure, to get people to come into the rooms, really. Even so, it doesn’t change the fact that I think TalkCity sucks.

You can also build your own HomePage (if you’re a registered member, of course) with TalkCity’s homepage builder. Personally, I find it very restricting, as you can’t include a lot of things such as advanced HTML and CGI scripting. Besides which, your content is censored like no other: There’s no such thing as freedom of speech in TalkCity.

Have I ever mentioned that I was once banned from TalkCity servers for over twenty-four hours because I was involved in a perfectly innocent discussion about the merits of legalizing marijuana in the United States? (I was talking with a chatter from Holland, for God’s sake!)

So, the censorship aspects of TalkCity also annoy the hell out of me. If I want to be baby-sat, I’ll sit under my grandmother’s watchful eye. When I log on to the Internet, I am doing it so that I can meet new people, hear different points of view, and express my thoughts freely. TalkCity doesn’t want to hear any of that nonsense, so I left. Besides which, a lot of the users kept talking about the same boring stuff all the time: Y2K was the main topic right before the end of 1999, which is the time that I decided to say sayonara to this lame server.

If you have the mind to chat with other people - which I honestly think is a waste of time, preferring sites such as this instead - I suggest the following course of action:

Login to https://mirc.com and download the latest version of mIRC. Go ahead and scan it for viruses, though there won’t be any in the installation file.

Install the software, read the Help files until you get an idea of what’s going on, then go to the login screen.

There is a drop-down list containing HUNDREDS of excellent chat servers - all for free, with few rules and restrictions regarding free speech. Select one, enter a username, and go for it. Eventually you’ll find one that you like - when this happens, register your username with that server and enjoy chatting.

One disadvantage to this, of course, is that most servers are filled with cybersex chat rooms. However, these can easily be avoided simply by not entering them - you are bound to find a G-rated channel that other ’’regulars’’ will go out of their way to keep safe and clean.