I have just enabled a new member bar feature on the Nexus sites and the forums that is going to be running through beta over the next couple of days. Before I say anything let me waylay your initial gulp reaction after you first saw it; you haven't picked up a malware toolbar off the internet! This is legit ;)

The toolbar will display for any members that are logged in to the sites or the forums and it syncs with the forums. You can turn the bar off in your preferences area if you don't want to see it or use it, or by clicking the red "Turn off" icon on the bar.

So what is it? It's essentially a rip of the Facebook chat bar that many people will be familiar with from Facebook with a few twists and differences here and there. It will allow you to see all the people in your friend's list that are online and also talk to them personally, one-on-one, if you like. You can make yourself visible to your friends, offline to them or show them you're busy and unlikely to reply. The personal chat also has a few gimmicky features, like the ability to play games with your friends (I've already had a game of chess with helpful member katashy) or send them handwritten pictures like on MSN.

In a similar vein there are also chat rooms that you can join and chat to others in (it's the third icon from the left). I'm in the main room most of the time (I know that's not much of an incentive to join in...) and you can also make your own rooms and even make password protected rooms if you want to have a little group meeting with your modding buddies or something. A word of advice if you want to stick around in the chat rooms for a little while: if you browse around the sites while in the room it will log you out of the room each time you move pages so my protip of the day is to click the "popout" option. It will put the chat room in it's own window and then you can browse around the sites to your hearts content while chatting to me ;)

Aside from the chatting features there's an option to view the site's Facebook fan page or, for our non-english friends, a button that can translate all the text on the site to a language of their choice. I only speak English unfortunately so I can't vouch for how good the translation is but it looks pretty cool none-the-less.

This is all gimmicky stuff and I know some of the people who use the forums and actively engage in the community are really liking the new features but some of you aren't going to be interested. That's cool, just disable the bar in your preferences and you won't see it any more.

So have fun with the new features. It can be slow at times, and sometimes it can timeout so if you haven't received any messages you're expecting in a while then try refreshing your page and it should sort the problem. I'm going to be monitoring how it performs on the server(s) over the coming 24 hours and I'll work from there. Who knows, I might be able to modify the bar so it can inform you when a new mod has been uploaded to the site. Now that would be cool.