"I am a college girl who lives in a dormitory. Unfortunately, I have no friends at school. Whenever I have nothing to do, I would just stay in my dormitory. Often times, I experience boredom. I honestly envy my classmates who often socialise on weekends.
One thing that I thought to do was to chat with strangers and hopefully make new friends. The first site that I joined was Chatib. It requires no registration to start chatting with other users.
I was excited at first because it's my first time to do this. So I looked around. There were many chat rooms that I could join. I could also send messages to a certain Chatib user. However, I was disappointed because most of the time, only a few are online. Not only that. Most messages that I would receive were messages offering sex. So I had no one to share a decent and sensible conversation with. I do hope still that I can find a better chat site to continue socialising online." - Student (22)
Design and Usability
The design of Chatib is just plain and simple. The font used is not to small and not too big, making it very easy to read. There are no overwhelming images and no striking hues as well. The colours used on the site, which are light pink, green, and blue, are easy on the eyes. These factors make the contents of the site very easy for its users to read.
On the other hand, it is not only a website's design that makes or breaks its overall functionality. What matters more than a site's appearance is its usability.
Unfortunately, Chatib's pages take too long to load, or sometimes, they won't load at all. In addition to that, messages do not appear. Even after clicking, messages still cannot be seen. And what's worse, sometimes when you click on a message, it will appear but also disappear after a few seconds. Some of the buttons on the site, particularly the 'Favourite' button do not function properly as well.
Chatib issues
A lot of Chatib users face several technical issues while on the site. Some of the different technical glitches and other issues that users encounter are:
Error 502
There have been many times when users would complain about always getting the Error 502, which is the Bad Gateway Error.
Frozen/unresponsive pages
There are also a lot of instances where Chatib pages are frozen or unresponsive. No matter what you click on, the page would still not load, which is annoying, especially if you have an ongoing chat with another user
App (?)
The site says that it has a mobile app version that is available to both Android and iOS users. On the contrary, there seems to be none because the app can't be found from both Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Limited features
Aside from chatting, there is almost nothing more to do on this site. Not even updating your profile and making it interesting. Therefore, the tendency is for you to get bored, especially if there is also no one to chat with.
Boring chat rooms
Many individuals join a chat site to kill boredom and make new friends. However, on Chatib, it takes a while to start a conversation because chat rooms are quiet. Another ironic thing is that Chatib is accessible to a lot of countries, but usually, chat rooms only have 15-25 active participants.