Is there a way to disable chat?

[AngledLuffa]

I have never met a single person in an Arena hearts game who I actually wanted to talk to. Everyone either plays silently or starts rude chats for no reason. It'd be a much more pleasant experience to just never talk to anyone around the table.

[RobertBr]

I have never met a single person in an Arena hearts game who I actually wanted to talk to. Everyone either plays silently or starts rude chats for no reason. It'd be a much more pleasant experience to just never talk to anyone around the table.

If someone is rude you should report them. BGA takes insults in chat seriously.

[Meeplelowda]

I have never met a single person in an Arena hearts game who I actually wanted to talk to. Everyone either plays silently or starts rude chats for no reason. It'd be a much more pleasant experience to just never talk to anyone around the table.

To answer the question in the title of your post, there is a third-party browser extensions that can do this, but there is no functionality built into BGA to do this.

[JimBut]

In the advanced section of the preferences you can add some custom CSS.

Something like the following may work, though I haven't tested this

Code: Select all

#chatbar{
	display: none;
}

[Cile]

I have never met a single person in an Arena hearts game who I actually wanted to talk to. Everyone either plays silently or starts rude chats for no reason. It'd be a much more pleasant experience to just never talk to anyone around the table.

If someone is rude you should report them. BGA takes insults in chat seriously.

Sure, that's something you should do after the game, but that's not a lot of help during the game while they're actively bothering you. Being able to leave chat or mute players is pretty basic functionality the site should have.

[GTSchemer]

Indeed, most multiplayer videogames allow you to report opponents while simultaneously muting them.

[Meeplelowda]

Being able to leave chat or mute players is pretty basic functionality the site should have.

During his Reddit AMA, founder Sourisdudesert said the chat function was created years ago in-house in a hack-a-thon like fashion. This was the reason given for why it lacks certain industry standard features.

Imagine trying to dig through someone else's code years later and add a functionality that wasn't planned for. They'd be better off just scrapping this chat and integrating an off-the-shelf solution, but who knows how difficult that would be.

[AngledLuffa]

The most useful addition would be if the chat just stopped once you RT someone. If I don't want to talk to that person again, why does it force me to keep listening to them for the rest of the game? It's pretty annoying

[Meeplelowda]

During his Reddit AMA, founder Sourisdudesert said the chat function was created years ago in-house in a hack-a-thon like fashion. This was the reason given for why it lacks certain industry standard features.

The creation of the chat feature was not quite how I remembered it (always question things you "know" based on memory), but it was definitely not designed as a dedicated project. It was a side quest, so to speak, of a video game he was developing. Here is the actual quote from Sourisdudesert:

Actually I tried to create a video game myself, which was a browser based multiplayer strategy game (civilization game), with a lot of interactions between players (trade, wars...).

I loved the social tools that I did for this game, but in the same time I realized that my game was very unbalanced and not very good at all. I concluded that I was not a good game designer, removed my game from this platform, create a board game framework, develop 5 board games and ... you know the rest.

So yes, when you are using the BGA newsfeed, the chat or the BGA groups, you are using something that was created more than 12 years ago for a poor browser based game that do not exists anymore

By the way, it's now closer to 14 years since these were implemented given that the AMA was over two years ago.