Very difficult to use on an unstable connection
I'm temporarily on a very unstable Internet connection right now, and it's flipping me out. See, when the Internet connection flops out, the chat channels I'm in becomes unresponsive, and I have to restart them, sometimes even restart the program.
I'm not a programmer myself, but I had an idea of how to solve this. How would it be to let the program send one ping to the server when starting the message, and then try to do whatever it needs to do to fix it (re-login etc) if the server's not responding. I got the idea from when MSN Messenger logs out from an unstable connection once you start writing something.
Also in group chats it would be nice to keep it pinging (with long intervalls, so it won't put any mentionable stress to the server). When I'm in a group chat and send a message when my connection is timed out, the whole thing freezes, and refuse to send the message even after the connections up again. I always have to restart the chat window.
I don't know how to make this clearer, sorry.