I had to get rid of the old chat bar. It was bugging the heck out of me. I'm personally hoping the trend of browser-bottom feature bars dies out quickly and I'm sure some of you can sympathize with me there. SMNet and chat features seem to not blend well together.
However, in removing the Instant Message bar I also removed the handy links that allowed you to share a post on Facebook or on Twitter. This is theoretically bad, as we got some nice linking back from Facebook.
With FB's increasingly nasty policies towards privacy and tracking, I'm not too inclined to install a "Like" button or anything that phones home to FB. The closest I'd want to implement is something that, like the old chat bar, lets you share an SMNetwork link to your FB feed without requiring any tracking or "opengraph" nonsense.
I'd like to hear what you guys would find most useful, though. All of the features in the poll have been implemented at one point or another. Each of them have issues with either technical implementation or political/privacy issues, so I'd rather not open worm tins unless there's a demonstrated need from y'all to do so.
If you have other features in mind, feel free to reply with suggestions. Chat will NOT be coming back, we simply do not have the staff coverage to properly police a 24/7 chat room. Anything else is theoretically fair game.
For the record, I promise no particular timeframe on rolling out changes in response to this poll, but as I'm working on something big for you guys I'll probably need a little break here and there and I can use those to install little things like these.
Poll