Hello everyone! We hope you’ve had a good start to 2024 so far. We’ve got a large update deploying over the next few days, so I wanted to show a sneak peek to the Forum users first. 
Let’s get started.
Statuses
You will soon be able to set a status in the chat. Simply click your name, and click Change Status to set your status.
From here, you will see a list of statuses to choose from:
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Away changes your icon to a clock, and shows “Away” under your rank, so others know you aren’t available. Once you begin interacting with the chatroom again, your Away status is removed, and you become Available again.
-
Busy prevents chatroom sounds from playing, and places a
symbol on your photo. Users who click you will see the “Busy” text under your rank, so they know you may not reply. -
Invisible has been moved here, rather than its own button when you click your name. The backend logic for this has also been greatly improved from our prior Invisible method.
Available/Away/Busy will be available on all chatrooms, including Free. Invisible will remain Community and higher for the time being.
Live Reactions
Perfect for events, Live Reactions will allow you to rapidly fire off an emoji to show your support.
Chatroom owners can configure whether or not to enable this feature, as well as which emoji can be used — you can choose to keep it simple with hearts, thumbs up, and confetti poppers 
, or enable full faces like our “Lol” emoji or “Shocked” emoji.
Live Reactions will launch for Pro & Business tiers first, and will be brought to more chatrooms in a future update.
Boosting, Billed Annually
Users who are looking to Boost their favorite chat will soon have the option to be billed annually, rather than monthly. Boosting annually will provide a 10% discount per year compared to monthly billing.
Existing Boosters will be able to upgrade their existing subscription to Annual and get their previous payments pro-rated. 
New Emoji
Several new free emoji will be included included in this release as well.
ThumbsUp, ThumbsDown, and Applause
New hand emoji. The previous ThumbsUp & ThumbsDown have been renamed to Like and Dislike, respectively. Clap remains the same.
The hands will match your customized emoji color, if set.
Confetti
A confetti emoji to celebrate good times. If you have the Custom Colors item from the Shop, you are able to color it as well.
Cute
A new “cute” emoji by popular request.
???
A new secret emoji was also added, in a similar vein to Cute. This emoji is not included in the list of emoji in the chat. Can you find it? (Hint: begins and ends with “U”)
Other miscellaneous changes that will be included in the update
- User List will behave better in chatrooms with >500 users
- The main menu of the Chat Settings will be re-organized into four sections instead of two
- “Custom Branding Icon” will be re-named to “Custom Icon.” This feature also work on redesigned chatrooms, by popular demand
Update will go live this weekend / early next week.
Stay tuned!