How to block a chatter from your Contacts list

Being invited to a chat can be like going on a blind date. Although you may know who invited you, you may not know the other personalities you are asked to socialize with in the chat window. And as with the majority of blind dates (we speak from experience), you may choose not to give out your phone number — or Skype Name, in this case. If you find a chatter who is objectionable, you can’t banish that person from the chat but you can block him or her from your Contacts list so that he or she can no longer have one-on-one chats with you. You can do this immediately in the Contacts window shown during your chat. Simply select the user’s name in the Chat Drawer, right-click to bring up the pop-up menu, and click Block This User.
When you block someone, Skype does your dirty work for you and turns away the unwanted skyper.

Using whisper chats

Whisper chats are one-on-one offshoots of group chats. If you are in a group chat and want to whisper to another participant for saying private matters like condolence sayings, you can easily open a new, private chat window. Simply follow these steps:

1. Select a user’s name for your whisper chat. You can find a chat partner in the Chat Drawer, a window pane that lists all the users. If you don’t see other users, click the Show Users icon in your Skype Toolbar (Windows) or select Window➪Drawer from the Skype menu (Mac). You can have a whisper chat with anyone in your list, even if that person is not on your Contacts list. Several icons appear in the window of the person you want to contact.
2. Click the Chat button. A new message window opens in addition to the group chat.
3. Type your message Be sure to separate the windows or make them different sizes. If you type a message in the wrong window, well, we’re sure you can fill in the consequence

Setting a time to chat

Anyone who chats across time zones for business communication knows that coordinating international time zones in a group meeting can be tricky. How do you decide when to meet if one member is in New York, another is in Mexico at Aztec ruins, and another is in Australia? One way is to agree to set your Skype meeting time to one time zone so that there is never any confusion about when to meet if what you are doing is internationally based.
To set your time zone in Skype, choose File➪Edit My Profile. Select the Show My Time check box and choose a time from the drop-down menu. Of course, if you agree on a time zone that is different from your local zone, you’ll have to do a little calculating to figure out how to set your watch, but Skype will be right on time, and you will have eliminated miscommunication and, possibly, missed meetings. It’s worth the effort.

The “ten” codes

The “ten” codes are numeric abbreviations for simple sentences developed for use in the military, police, and emergency communications over specific radio frequencies. Citizen’s Band (CB) radio users, or hams, adopted the use of ten codes to help understand other CB hams. Problems such as too much static, voices cutting in and cutting out, and difficulty in identifying the speaker and when he or she was done talking resulted in the widespread use of the ten codes. Bringing order to a chat may lead to using some common signals. Why not the “ten” codes?
Useful codes include:
10-3 — Stop transmitting
10-4 — Message Received; Affirmative
10-6 — Busy
10-9 — Repeat your message
10-12 — Stop
10-16 — Reply to message
10-18 — Urgent

How to Master the Chat Chaos?

Chatting with a friend is easy. When you have chats with three, four, or more people, the conversations quickly become lively, fun, and fast paced. Sometimes the words are whizzing by more quickly than you can type, and it feels more like a video game than a conversation. In a chat with three or more people, chatters talk past each other all the time.

Questions are asked, and before they are fully answered, more comments, inquiries, and observations pop up in the chat window. You wonder, Who is asking, what am I answering, how do we control this conversation? As with a new class of school kids, it’s hard to stop everyone from talking simultaneously. To help manage the chaos, consider designating a chat abbreviation (a word or emoticon) to indicate the end of each complete thought. As a nod to the past, we use the old CB radio ten codes (see the sidebar “The ‘ten’ codes”). If you are about to launch into a long story, don’t wait until the end to post what you’ve written in the message window. If you press Enter after each line, your chat buddies can read your story as you type it, and maybe they’ll be less inclined to interrupt. Just be warned that if you use too many breaks, you may confuse your chat buddies.

Why would you have 100 skypers chatting at one time?

As unbelievable as it sounds, you can invite up to 100 other friends or colleagues to a Skype chat. That’s a lot of people! Why so many people? Well, here are some things as many as 100 skypers may be gathered for:

• Predicting election results from their own congressional districts
• Celebrating the exact time the New Year starts in their own countries and time zones
• Keeping their own minutes at a Board Meeting
• Planning a reunion
• Performing in a poetry slam

How to set Skype for Chat?

Starting a chat is easy. Pick someone you want to chat with (someone who is online), and follow these steps:

1. Select a Skype contact from your Contacts list.
2. Click the blue Chat button in the toolbar. If you don’t see the button, open the View menu to verify that a check mark appears next to the View Toolbar option. After you click the Chat button, you’re ready to chat! When your chat opens, it’s ready for you to chat with the Skype contact you selected. A confident chat organizer can invite more than one contact simultaneously. To do so, select several (or all) of your contacts in the main Skype window by pressing and holding the Shift key and clicking their names; then, click the Chat button.
3. To chat with your contact, enter your text in the text box at the bottom of the chat window and press Enter to post the message in the chat room. A shaded separator bar that contains your name as well as the date and the time of your message appears in the chat window. The separator bars are color-coded so that you can easily spot your messages in the chat, which makes finding your text in the message window easier. Given the sometimes chaotic, free-for-all nature of chat rooms, you can easily forget your own conversational thread — especially when you’re chatting with more than one person at a time. Picking through the messages quickly to find your notes helps you remember the point you are making.

To invite others to join your chat, simply drag and drop a contact from your main window into your message window).
Buddies in a chat room are free to invite their own friends into the chat by dragging and dropping contacts from their own lists. When a new person is added, an alert appears in each chat participant’s window. This alert also identifies the user who invited the new participant as well as the time he or she was added. No secrets here!
Choosing a slew of contacts for a group chat can be useful. Maybe you want to be sneaky. Maybe you are planning a surprise party for your best friend, and you want to use Skype to make sure that all the people you plan to invite are in on the chat from the beginning so that you don’t spoil the surprise. In one chat, you can pick a time, place, gift, entertainment, and any other tidbits crucial to a good surprise while avoiding telephone and email tag. Then you can add your best friend to the chat, pretend that everyone is planning a group run in the park, and have the group enter the date in their calendars. Because your soon-to-be-surprised friend was added midway through the chat, he or she can’t see the prior conversation. The surprise is intact and your friend none the wiser. Isn’t that what best friends are for?