Chatzy
Type of site | Chat Service |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Founded | 2001 |
| Country of origin | Romania (unconfirmed) |
| Owner | Unknown |
| CEO | Unknown |
| Website | http://www.chatzy.com |
| IPv6 support | Yes |
| Alexa rank | https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/chatzy.com |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | September 19th, 2002 |
| Current status | Active |
| Written in | HTML5 |
Chatzy is an English-speaking, European chat service website. Launched in September 2002, Chatzy hosts chatrooms dedicated to a wide variety of topics and purposes, from online hookups to internet roleplaying, video games, anime, and celebrities, among others. Chatrooms are created and moderated individually by users and, in most cases, are not involved with site administration. Although it was originally intended as a means of fast communication via an email invite between participants, it is now most commonly used as a medium through which communities are created around a given topic. At one point early in its life, Chatzy was most commonly used for business applications.
Chatzy is provided by w3-ventures.com (which is also a host to FreezePage, a personal web archive site with a similar interface), which is based in Bucharest, Romania. w3-ventures.com is provided by ServerMania. Although European, Chatzy's servers are based in the United States.
Users are able to create quick chats and virtual rooms. Quick chats are intended to be sent via an email invitation as a means of real-time communication, although they do not offer much customization. Virtual rooms have many properties that are able to be changed at any given time by users with permissions to do so. By default, virtual rooms are set to a limit of 10 users at a time and do not support direct messaging between non-premium users, among other specific functions such as the ability to fully view chat content history or have more than 10 users online at one time.
Chatzy's service is free on its own, although users can subscribe to a premium service for a specified amount of time at a specific, pre-determined rate. Premium users receive additional benefits across all rooms they visit (including non-premium ones), and premium rooms apply full benefits to all users within the room (including non-premium users). The majority of thriving chatrooms on the site are premium rooms, although exceptions do exist in smaller, closer-knit communities. Chatzy has not updated the appearance of its user interface since 2008, and features generally are not updated following their introduction.
Users are able to register with an email address and password. From there, they are able to set their own Chatzy ID that is visible across all rooms. By default, the least significant bit of their IP address is shown to all visitors on the visitor list except for the room administrator (who will see the associated email). Users can also link a Facebook profile to their account, although this is far less common.
The majority of the website's userbase is roughly divided into two groups: online dating and roleplay. Although online dating and pornography continue to be one of the main driving forces of Chatzy's userbase, with chatrooms created for such a purpose reaching over 400 users at any given time of day, more knit communities typically develop between and within smaller rooms that are generally dedicated to roleplay. Chatzy's community is most commonly defined by its role-playing chatrooms, although this varies greatly between topics. Despite this, adhesion between multiple rooms of varying topics is very common, and it is not unusual for one user to attend multiple rooms at once. Chatzy reached peak popularity in August of 2014, and has been on a steady decline following July of 2015, with the rise of chat clients such as Discord contributing to the overall decline of its userbase as more visitors began switching platforms.
Written history of the website does not exist in significant capacity, although users have written about the website and its history in the past. These can be found on the unofficial Chatzy wiki.
References
This article "Chatzy" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Chatzy. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
