Create your own private disappearing chatroom with hack.chat

By

Now you can chat in your own private, disposable room in seconds.
Now you can chat in your own private, disposable room in seconds.
Photo: hack.chat

There are a dozen-odd ways to chat with people these days, from IM to Twitter direct messages to apps like Slack, Snapchat and GroupMe.

If you want to create your own with no more fuss than typing in a unique URL in your web browser, though, you can’t go wrong with hack.chat, a new, bare-bones, no-frills approach to private chat that looks like something out of the DOS era. And I mean that in a good way.

It’s dead simple to use (though you can also run your own server) and incredibly disposable. Perfect for those quick chats you need to make happen that you may not want on something like Slack, which keeps an archive of all the inappropriate comments you’ve ever written.

To create a disposable hack.chat, simply head to the website and add a ? and a string of text to the URL. For example, https://hack.chat/?random-channel will create a chat room named “random-channel.” Any text string will work, too, so feel free to get crazy with nonsense characters, too.

You can send the new URL to anyone you need to talk to privately and be chatting in less than 10 seconds. There are no channel lists kept anywhere, so random people won’t show up in your hack.chat (unless you use something guessable for your channel name).

Formatting is possible with LaTeX markup, too.

Here are some channels hack.chat’s home page has for you to join and test out; just add the name to the url https://hack.chat/

?lobby ?meta ?random
?technology ?programming
?math ?physics ?asciiart
And here’s a random one generated just for you: ?4r2li1m7

Creator Andrew Belt, a student at the University of Tennessee, promises that no message history is kept on the hack.chat servers, so random channel names can be created for purely private discussions.

So, if you’re looking for a quick and dirty way to get your chat on without having to download an app or worry about privacy, hack.chat could be your go to.

Via: The Next Web

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.