JumpInChat

Site supporter system was released, allowing users to support the site either by monthly subscription or a one-time payment. This in-site support replaces ko-fi, and allows user's support to be attributed to their accounts.

It marks the first step towards a paid feature system, with subscribers being given perks such as higher video quality broadcasts, profile and user customization and additional room features.

It was new years day, 2018, that my first test of the site truly occurred. A competitor site suffered a major service degradation as people were hanging around to celebrate the impending new year. As it happened, I had offered my site as a backup a short time before and word was passed around that it was up and running. Users then flooded in and maxed out my capacity on all fronts.

Until now, users had been mostly the odd friend I had convinced to hang around or a few vaguely regular users who kept to themselves. Suddenly there were hundreds of users, dozens of broadcasts, and a whole lot of panic on my part. I was also drunk after celebrating my own new year some hours before and in the worst possible position for emergency tech support when the rush of mainly US base users appeared.

In the end, everything worked save for some increased latency. Everyone got to wish each other a Happy New Year and I learnt some valuable lessons, and got some useful feedback.

This ultimately resulted in two things. Firstly, awareness of my site increased massively, giving me more regular users and much more presence over all. Secondly, it pushed me to engineer a better capability for scale, which now supports a steady flow of active users.

It was the first real test of the site in the wild, and a de-facto public launch. It gave people the opportunity to revel with friends, which is what I ultimately wished the site was for from the beginning.

The idea for creating a video chat site came about when the existing site I was using started to stagnate. This particular site, at the time, was entirely based on Flash and was not updated for quite some time. Adding to rapidly out of date technology, it was suffering from a recent management change resulting from an exit. User numbers were shrinking, communities I was part of began to disappear and the ever increasing security black hole that was Flash was becoming issue.

Since WebRTC was being popularized as the future alternative for data-streaming in the browser, I decided to try my hand at implementing it in a project of my own. Something that would, I hoped, replace those sites that did not adapt.