Gone are the days when you had to keep clicking the refresh link on the Res shoutbox, or SB as we fondly call it. At last Rescreatu has a new shout box that automatically refreshes!

The SB is actually a very important part of life on Rescreatu, as most denizens hang out in it. We use it to talk to friends, buy, sell, trade, make tu, or just plain shoot the breeze. It's part of the reason Res is as tight-knit as a small town. It's the heart of the site, Gossip Central galore. When Patrick took the SB down once, because he felt staff couldn't keep an eye on it, people bitterly complained and logged on less often. So now it stays.

The new SB, aside from being self-refreshing, has smaller fonts. As a result, some people who are used to the old SB are complaining that it hurts their eyes; however, as a former Yahoo! chatroom denizen, I'm used to it, so I can't say that I complain much about it. The SB rules are missing, and it seems basic HTML formatting, as well as automatic conversion of posted URLs into links, don't work anymore. I hope Patrick reinstates those, as we don't have any rules to point to anymore when newbs and n00bs start spamming.

The SB has both an expanded version as well as the small version that we see at the upper right side of every Res page. We can turn the small version off and just keep the big version open in a separate tab. At present, this is the best option for the SB especially when you keep multiple tabs of Res open, as new posts show up in the SBs open on the different tabs so it is hard to keep track of them. Keeping just the big SB open concentrates all the posts in one place.