Hey everyone! We have officially got an XMPP chat running for those of you who might be interested in hanging out with the YAM community in a classic text chat environment. This will also be utilized in the future for a space to chat about events that occur on the radio or anywhere else. As of right now this is in a beta test state, mainly because it will require you to use your own XMPP client, which I will explain below. Our goal is to get it as an actual chat box you can interact with on the web without messing with potentially confusing software.
Instructions
Connecting with a client
Download or use a web based XMPP client. I personally recommend using the browser client https://conversejs.org/ (https://conversejs.org/) if you have no prior experience with XMPP. It is also just easy! Create an account and enter "usersplayground.com" as the XMPP provider to register with. Login to your newly registered account and you are in! (be sure to put "@usersplayground.com" after your username when logging in) If you do not see any chat rooms click on the three horizontal lines by the "GROUPCHATS" tab and select "Query Server." Then click on "Show groupchats" to view the current rooms that exist. Select the room, set a nickname and chat!
If you want a more classic command-line style you can use https://profanity-im.github.io/ (https://profanity-im.github.io/). It works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Here is a list of a bunch of clients if my recommendations don't fit your preferences, https://xmpp.org/software/?category=clients (https://xmpp.org/software/?category=clients)
Connecting through our site
This is being worked on! Once we implement this feature it will essentially negate all of the prior instructions unless you just feel like using your own client still.