Help and Information about Finding Chat Rooms on WinMX

One thing that separates WinMX from other maybe faster newer p2p networks is its immense and diverse community that live in the Chat rooms.  This is a part of WinMX that is often overlooked by new users, either they haven't discovered it or feel like its a scary world and darn't travel there.  
The advice We give new users about Chat Rooms is this, it's like any where in the world you meet all sorts in Chat rooms there are some strange ones, weird ones, sad ones, happy ones you name it they are in a Chat room somewhere on WinMX but most of the users you encounter there are helpful, caring, and fun users that are willing to be patient with someone that is new to the world of Chat.

A Getting Started Guide for New Chatters

Here is how you can go about finding rooms that might interest you.

Finding Rooms:

You'll notice once you get past the legal warning about the Chat Function, a list of Chat rooms on WinMX will appear in the window, some of which have names you can read just fine, others have strange characters in the names (these are regular rooms of foreign speaking users, usually Japanese or an Asian language characters), all of them have a set of numbers/letters after the name that looks like this _ABCDEF123456 (this is called the 'hash' and is the host's IP number and the port in hexadecimal, which your WinMX will use to join the room).  

You may wonder 'How am I meant to sort through this mess to find anything' well there are a few ways you can make finding a room easier.

Sorting room names in ABC order is easy if you want to have a browse through them all to see what's out there.  On the Chat window in the bar just above the actual list you will see the words 'Channel', if you click on this it will sort them alphabetically, if you would like to sort by any of the other items in that bar you simply click on them.  For example if you want to sort them by how many users they have in them, click the 'Users' part of the bar.
This is the only method for sorting the channel names in some of the older WinMX versions such as 3.31 or older.

If, like most users, you have WinMX v3.53 or WinMX v3.54 beta 4 there are a couple of ways to also keep track of channels or find ones you might like (the method mentioned above also works on these versions).  

Filter Bar:

On WinMX v3.5x and higher Frontcode added a few features to help you find rooms you may like. The Filter Bar was added and is located on the Chat Window of WinMX, it's very useful when wanting to find rooms that cover subject matters you may be interested in or if you know some of the words only in a room you like, this will take and show only the rooms that match the text you put into the Filter bar.  Simply make sure the Filter Button is in the depressed position and type in words like 'Music', 'Movies', or 'family' and get results that match.  Once you see a room you want in the list below, simply double click it and wha la you enter.

You can even paste entire names of rooms (when we speak of entire names we generally mean The Room Name_123456ABCDEF with the 'hash' letters and numbers on the ends) into the Filter bar to join the rooms.  
When you use this paste the full name into the Filter bar making sure there are no extra blank spaces on the end of the letters and then look to the right and find the 'Join' button, click this and wha la there you are again entered.

You can also use the Filter bar to sort through the Topics of rooms in case your subject of interest is only mentioned in the Topic, If you want to adjust that do the following:

Go to WinMX Settings > Channels > then on the right side you'll see a tick box labeled 'Include Topics if Channel Filter' put a tick in this and refresh your Chat list.


If you have any other problems and can't find answers in this Help Section please visit the forum.
Chat Issues Forum
Return back to the Chat Index?
Chat Problems Index
Return to the main WinMX Help Index?
Main WinMX Help Index