On October 28th, 2009 at 1am EDT AddonInteractive will launch the latest update (version 8.5) of our flagship product, AddonChat. During this software update, many AddonInteractive services, including AddonLiveSupport will be temporarily unavailable for approximately three hours.

As with all updates, no action will be required on your part. Our service updates are completely automated and free of charge. Beginning with version 8.5, AddonChat will require using Java 5 or later. While it is unlikely that your users will have an older version of Java than required, we encourage you and your users to upgrade to the latest version by visiting http://www.java.com/.

AddonChat version 8.5 will continue to provide you and your users with the same rich feature set available in the current release, along with many exciting new features and improvements including:

• New, Multi-Line WYSIWYG Editor with Word Wrap
• New Customizable Settings, Icons, and User Group Privileges
• High Performance Chat Display Engine - Nearly 10x Faster!
• Customizable Away Modes & Icons
• Easily Set Chat Room Topics
• New Admininstrative Features, including Room Transfer, and Screen Clearing
• Recent Room History will now store up to 100 Messages for one week
• Multiple Time Zone Support
• All Editions of AddonChat will now be Firewall Friendly
• Enhanced Text Replacement Engine Featuring Phrase and Regular Expression Matching
• Enhanced User Group Permissions with customizable user list icons.
• User Group Ranks permit you to define a setting for each usergroup for finer control of room access.
• Lots of new Features for our Advanced Users, inclduing access to direct settings, updates to remote functions, and new applet parameters
• New Security Features, Performance Improvements, Bug Fixes and Minor Updates
• ... and much more!

Beginning with AddonChat v8.5, we will also be introducing two new modules. These modules will be available for purchase via customer control panel as soon as the v8.5 is online:

• GEO Location (included with Enterprise edition). This module will allow you to see the city, region and country of users in your chat room.
• Keyword Sensitive Text Campaign Engine. Create as many text messages as you'd like to be displayed in your chat room at an interval of your choosing. Optionally, specify multiple key words for each campaign so that they are triggered when users in your chat room enter that key word. Fully customizable display format allowing use of HTML and BBCode within content. An excellent tool for advertising!

A comprehensive list of updates and new features can be found online at http://forums.addoninteractive.com/showthread.php?t=4837&p=20482. Developers of AddonChat plugins are strongly encouraged to visit this link as it contains important updates, including our new remote authentication specification and API updates. Language translation maintainers are encourgaged to visit our Translation File Library to download the latest language file updates new to version 8.5. We provide a three month account extension/upgrade for complete, submitted translation updates, and a 6 month account extension for (complete) new translation submissions.

For the last decade, AddonInteractive has provided reliable, full-featured hosted web applications to customers around the world at an exceptional value. Moving forward, we will continue to deliver frequent software updates with exciting new features as well as new and innovative products to keep your online community growing with cutting edge technology.

Sincerely,

The AddonInteractive Team
support@addonchat.com