little toolbar thingey?
One day I was checking my email and noticed an abundance of emails had seemingly popped out of nowhere, at an unheard of number of 38 unread emails in my inbox. Normally I check my email before and after shcool, and whenever I find myself to be mindnumbingly bored, so naturaly it never gets terribly high(usually somewhere from 4 to 8 ). So you can imagine my confusion when, even though i had checked it not 9 hours ago, there was a sudden flood of activity! And here's the real shocker: about 35 of them were from anthrocon(where as normally less then 10-25% of them are from here), and most of those were from the "discusion content" thread.
So, after checking all these emails and seeing that none of them were of immediate importance to me, I continued my daily buisness. Well, today, my school was snowed in, so I decided to comment on some of the posts that were at the very least slightly interesting.
But when I came to the web page, I noticed a little grey bar sitting at the bottom of my screen. After further examination of the mysterious new arrival, I saw that it was imbued with search capabilities, and connections to various socialization sites. Because of the general resemblance it had to several of the chatbars i'd seen in various MMOSGs, I logicly assumed it was a chatbar of some sort. I was very excited about this, but, to my dismay, nobody responded to any of the things I typed in(after which i checked to make sure there were actually other people on the site to chat with, if it was indeed a chatbar). I deduced instead that it was a search engine sort of thing that was conveintly empowered with the aforementioned connections, and not vice versa. I then utilized it to see if anyone else had noticed this strange new device, but to my astonishment no one had mentioned it.
So what is it? Or, more importantly, why and when did it get here? Because i certainly haven't noticed it before now. (And I happened to be in a very literature-ey mood today, hence the vocabulous and verbose descriptions of everything.)
The text box is a search box. (note the magnifying glass icon next to it) If the text box gets to confusing, I can always take it out.
And yes, it's new. I just installed the Wunderbar module last night. That toolbar is to try and promote our social web presence a little better, as well as having a handy way to search and log in/out of the website.
Chat is something I'm working on, too. I just started evaluating a chat module last night.
No, I've grown rather fond of it...not that I've used it terribly much lately; I've been cooped up in bed all day watching a Stargate Atlantis marathon.
Hmmm...so does that mean we should have chat running in a couple days? Or is it closer to a couple weeks?
A couple of weeks, if not longer.
I have other website-related things on my plate, and some bug fixes and features to add to our registration system.
How do I shut it off? I don't need any of its functions, and even when minimized it takes up too much space on my 13" laptop screen. I checked my account settings and didn't see any way to disable it. (In fact I just broke it by minimizing and then maximizing it again. It got twice as wide as before with a big blank area at the left, and the minimize button disappeared. Serves me right for monkeying, I guess. It fixed itself when I refreshed the page.)
If it 'broke' the same way it did for me (it sounds identical), you can also bring it back to the minimized state another way. At the right, there will be two elements of the original toolbar: one above and one below the now-extended toolbar. If you go to the piece below the bar and move your cursor, the > sign is barely visible. Click it and the bar reverts to the minimized state. Refreshing the page is simpler, of course...
The easiest way to not see it (for now, anyway) is to use Internet Explorer... but I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.
Not a fan, either. It's as welcome as a pop-up ad with no close button. It steals valuable browser real estate without permission. If I could shut it off, I would.
Thirded, but my opinion doesn't have the weight of yours and PeterCat's 
At least on IE (before it was disabled), you had to scroll to the end of the page to see it, though that arguably defeats its purpose. On Firefox, it's always there 
I just opened a feature request to ask if the ability to remove the bar could be added in.
If I get no response (or the author indicates it's not on his/her TODO list), I'll add in the functionality myself.
The new feature is called the "Wunderbar" (don't blame me!). Giza added it last night. Apparently, it's a short-cut to most/all of the social networking functions Anthrocon supports, along with a search function.
The e-mails may be occurring because of another function which is not new. When you post to a topic, all later posts can be e-mailed to you automatically. You can disable this function in the User Menu to your left. It's under My Subscriptions, then Pages/Threads. Turn off the notifications and save your changes at the bottom. No more e-mails.