Today are launching a trial of ‘live chat‘ support.  This gives our customers one more way to access us (in addition to email, IM, tickets and phone).

We still expect the bulk of our support work to be done via emails or tickets.  Since that let’s both parties keep a good written history of the request.

But ‘chat’ can be helpful for general questions, or for things like getting a quick update on the status of a support request or order.

Our chat implementation consists of 37 signal’s ‘Campfire’ web chat application.  Since most of our staff hang out in a private Jabber chat room and probably have enough browser tabs open already I hacked up a Ruby application to pipe the Campfire conversations into our Jabber server (and back out from us to the Campfire room).  The application uses tinder, a wrapper on the Campfire API and xmpp4r, a Jabber library.

So.  Please pop by our ‘chat‘ page the next time you have a quick question.  And we will try our best to help out.