Update: They have now made it an option, whether to do whispering in the main chat room, or to have it in a tab. There is now a setting called “Whispers In Tab” that does what it says on the tin.

It’s nice to see a company accept when they have made a mistake, and roll back a change that hasn’t worked.

A few days ago F4F was quite pleased to launch a new way of doing “Whisper” in text chat. If you haven’t used it before then Whisper is a way that F4F, and a few other sites, allow a member to talk “quietly” to the camgirl without it being visible to others.

It’s rather like a PM chat, but in the main public chatroom. Here is how it originally worked:

This means that both public chat, and whispered messages, are interleaved in the text chat window as you type and read.

It is great for a way to quickly make a small comment to the model, particularly if it is about somebody or something in the main discussion that you don’t want to be overhead about, hence the name Whisper.

At F4F a viewer just had to type a “/” before what they were typing to have it become a whisper, and visible only to the host of the room.

Well, Flirt4Free decided that they would make a different user interface for this. The whispers were to be moved out into a separate tab, and the / key would now switch to that tab.

You end up with two tabs, one for the public chat, and one for the private whispering.

Or to put it another way, they implemented the multi-tab chat which on sites like Chaturbate and Stripchat are just considered PM.

And while PM is great, it isn’t the same as Whisper.

In the F4F viewer forum, lots of members said they were not happy with this change, and when into some detail about how they were using Whisper currently and why this new layout made it harder for them.

Flirt4Free listened to their members’ feedback and decided to revert the change. The Whisper feature is now back to its original interface, allowing members to continue using it as before. The / key once again allows for private messaging in the main chat window.

The regular members at F4F in the forum are quite capable of expressing their use pretty clearly, and after just 8 posts there was a response from the company saying they were reverting the change and would look instead for other ways to improve the interface.

It’s great to see a company be responsive like that, and admit when they have go something wrong. Too often you see a company doubling-down on their decision, because they may have invested quite a bit of effort into a change, but of course the customer is always right is the best course.

Have you tried the Whisper feature at F4F? How about at other sites that support it? Give it a try and let me know!

Visit Flirt4Free