Quite often I have had chats in the Chatroom, using apric,

when I get a message saying that the person I have been chatting with is "unknown" and more recently I have noticed

that there is general advice "The Lobby has unknown users".

It could be fairly innocent or it could be sinister. If you have spent some minutes chatting personally only to find out that the other party is "unknown". Are these people just not registered or are some of them using the chat for maleovalant or other reasons?

I have been put off entering by seeing this message and I imagine that that is what your advice would be.

Any comments?

There are two issues here.

(1) The main page and the message board page usually reports the number of people in the chat. Because of the programming behind generating those numbers if the chat service goes down it affects the ability for the main index and the message board pages to load properly. We currently are working on the issue and will hopefully have it resolved soon.

(2) If you are chatting with a person and get a message that they are unknown it typically means that either they or you have disconnected from the server. What it really means is that you are trying to send a message to a user that your IRC client can't find destination for.

Bottom line, there's nothing sinister about either one of the messages. There's no reflection on the person or the chat room in terms of security.

In an unrelated note, there are no guarantees ANY time you are chatting with a person, here on the Archive or otherwise. Consequently everyone should be cautious when exchanging personal information or, especially, meeting in real life.