Well, with a simple logout, close and reopen of the sidebar, you’ll find that Chatsum now comes with an all new and exciting sound effect engine. If you’re one of those people that hates sound effects, don’t worry, there’s a preference to turn them off in the ‘Places to Chatsum’ drawer.

We’ve deliberately kept the number of sounds minimal because we’d like you to tell us what you think it needs. The main purpose of the sounds (at the moment) is to alert you to incoming chat if you have Firefox in the background. You can also use the fantastic All-In-One Sidebar extension to collapse Chatsum without closing it so you can browse full screen and hear if there’s any chat going on.

We currently have sounds for changes to the number of people in the room and for when new chat arrives - let us know what you think needs sound and what you think it should sound like by commenting on this post.

If you look in the preferences section of the drawer, you’ll also see a ‘Default to Page Chat Mode’ checkbox. Turning this on will try to keep you in page chat, rather than site chat, as much as possible. Hopefully this will mean that comments will start to become much more page specific and will alleviate the problems we’ve had with people commenting on specific Digg, Flickr or BBC News articles in the main domain space. Turn it on and see if you like it!

Lastly, we’ve updated the Known Bugs and Current Road Map pages and made them permanently accessible from the menu on the right of this site. Take a look at the Road Map to see what we’re currently working on.

This is the list of bugs that we’re currently aware of - we’ll cross them off the list as we squash them.

1. Posts sometimes appear twice in the chat transcript.

2. Posts from room A sometimes appear in room B when switching from one to the other.

3. Non-Latin text appears garbled on the Chatsum website.

4. Staying in a room for a very long time causes sluggish behaviour.

5. The Ctrl-Alt-C shortcut sometimes fails to toggle the Chatsum sidebar (Note: this appears to be a Firefox bug, at least on Mac OS. If you experience this bug try clicking on the Firefox window and pressing Ctrl-Alt-C again. If it still doesn’t work please let us know).

6. OS X Firefox in some cases refuses to install the extension. We’ve had reports of the url not loading or of the extension appearing in the Extensions window and then disappearing. Any more reports from people having trouble installing would be great as we haven’t been able to recreate this in the lab.