When I type into the chat room bar characters don't appear

When I type into the chat room bar characters don't appear. I've done all I know to do. I registered, clicked the links in my email. What have I neglected. Is their a charge for the chat room use? Can anyone help? TY Johnny

There is no charge; this is actually an ongoing issue with some users. I myself can't even get into chat right now (on the work comp), as the loading progress bar perpetually loops.

All I can recommend at the moment is to try another browser and update your Flash player (or if you're up to date on it, roll back to a previous version).

Also make sure you're logged in. When you first open the site, the chat room pops up. But you're viewing it as a guest, not a member. And guests are only allowed to read, not type or use mic. So log in, press the blue 'chat now' button and you should be good.
If you are already doing that, i don't know. We get this question about once a week and no one posts the answer of how they fixed it.

I really think there is some conflict with a Windows update or a driver conflict with Flash/CC's chat applet. I'm trying to narrow it down here at work, as I can recreate one issue here but not at home.

There are random issues like this (e.g., not being able to type in the text input) that just seem to randomly happen. I've talked to some other knowledgeable people who have confirmed my hunch:

Our chat app is a "legacy app" -- it was coded many years ago for Flash Player 6 (I simply added on many features such as the voice and video, but it's still a Flash Player 6 app). All newer version of the Flash Player are *supposed* to be backwards compatible with all legacy Flash apps, but actually it's not perfect backwards compatibility, and Adobe probably isn't very concerned about rare cases such as ours.

So the real solution is for us to design our own chat app from the ground up, for Flash Player 11+. (We need funding for that.)

In the meantime, what usually works when people have these random issues is to try another browser (Chrome, IE, or Firefox).

Dang Robo! That's back under the Macromedia moniker days.

Why is it this isn't a prevalent problem though? Only some users seem to encounter it, and many report back that a different browser doesn't fix anything.