Main Join Othius!
What is Othius.com? Simply Stated: Othius.com is a free online chatting community. The Othius Goal: Our goal is to create the most robust and dynamic online communication network available. How do we plan to do this? Our current forte is the in-browser HTML based chat. However, we are working on a Flash based autoscrolling IRC style chat to interact with our current system. Future goals include standalone chat interfaces, pager style interfaces, and various other ways to communicate into a single network of chat rooms and members. What's in it for Othius? Truth be told, not much as of yet. We've yet to see a dime in return for our services. We have a few pay advertisers, but they only pay when a purchase is made by a customer after clicking their banner on our site. We are currently looking into different advertising companies in an effort to generate revenue. We do not have any plans at all to ever charge for our services. What we have gotten out of this project is experience. We've gained experience in internet related areas from HTML and CSS to ASP and SQL databases and back to browser compatibility. What's in it for ME? For starters: Free chat. More over, this is a growing community. We're not sure where it's going from here, but right now we have some loyal, friendly users that frequent our site every day. We're working on a user rewards system that's based on giving more to users the more they actively participate in our community. Who exactly is Othius? The Othius staff currently consists of two young redheaded internet users that live in the NYC metropolitan area. Both spent several years chatting at other sites before deciding to venture into their own. With over 10 years of combined experience in chatting, and other internet and computer related fields, we're trying to bring a culmination of our skills and experience into a working environment. Why did you make Othius? We started Othius because we had used other chatting systems, and realized that they weren't perfect by far. Those that were visually appealing lacked features, feature rich chats lacked proper design. Most chats have unique features, however they tend to be poorly implemented or difficult to use. We have plans for extensive features with a relatively simple user interface, with these features being server-side they should be cross-platform and cross-browser. Pager interfaces are excellent chatting tools, but poor tools for making new friends. Browser based chats and IRC are good for making new friends, but often lack the convenience of staying in touch with those you already know. Our planned in browser paging and friends system combines the best of both worlds with instant messaging with friends and alerts within the chats. What are the advantages of using Othius? Othius provides several unique opportunities to it's members, such as: Othius is dedicated to chat. The chat comes first, here. We developed the chat software, and will continue to develop it. Other software and other features on our site comes as a distant second. We are making a chat community, not a cluttered web community. All features that we may implement will be to complement the chat, not to create more revenue. Plus, when you come here, you can be assured that our users are dedicated to chat as well, otherwise they wouldn't use our service. Security Some chats give out your IP address identifying and security purposes. Worse yet, some programs actually establish a direct connection into your computer via your IP address. This is an open door for DOS (denial of services) programs and other immature behavior that could even result in harm done to your computer. At Othius we do not give your IP to the general public. Rather, the only people who may view your IP are Othius Employees and Chat Admins (who are trusted chatters that are given the power to moderate certain chats). That means that the only people who have access to your IP are people we trust not to abuse that access, and to only use it for purposes of making the chat a better environment for all. Privacy At Othius we know how important it is to remain somewhat anonymous in a public environment on the internet. We do not require, or have any place for, you to give your name, address, or phone number. We are a free advertising based service, thus do not need you to give any credit or billing information at all. If ever a security issue did arise concerning the account information we have on our server, it would all be relatively trivial because no personal information could be shared other than an email address. Confidentiality For registration purposes we do require a valid email address. Othius will not sell or distribute your email address without your knowledge/expressed consent. At some point we may have a monthly mailing to our users, this mailing will only be sent as requested. Currently the only mail going to this address is your username and password list, so it is very important that this email address be valid and belong to you, otherwise unauthorized individuals could gain access to your accounts. Usernames The internet is a large community. Millions of users are logging in every day. Larger chatting networks mean more of a chance that the username you want is taken. Join Othius while we're young and you have a better chance of getting your username. Also, we support multiple usernames for a single email account. We know that free email addresses are easy to come by, and if you want multiple usernames you'll simply go get another email address. Before long you have more email address and usernames than you can keep track of. At Othius you only need one email address, and if you forget any of your usernames or passwords you simply put your email address into our Forgot Password form and we'll send you a complete list. The ability to chat from any machine with an internet connection. With Othius's browser based chat, you can chat anywhere using any browser (in noframes). Other systems require that you have special software to talk to your friends, sometimes with huge downloads and major installs. With Othius you do not ever have to install anything on your machine. In the future, we may have special software to interact with our chatting system, but you don't have to use it to interact with others within the same system. This creates another advantage: The ability to chat using any OS. Macintosh, Windows, Linux, OS2, and Unix users can all gather in the same chat at Othius. The HTML language we use is relatively universal. The noframes chat works in 99.9% of the browsers still used. Firewall friendly. Because Othius uses the HTTP protocol to transfer it's data back and forth it works through any firewall that allows you to view webpages. The only stipulation is that you have your browser set to allow form submittions and cookies. So Why not Othius? By this point, that should be the only question you have. However, if you have any more questions, Join Othius and take a look for yourself. You can also email webmaster@othius.com with any questions we may not have answered.