earliest contributions came from David Lee, Lead Developer of Phalanx. David worked for many years reverse engineering the majority of the protocol for proper communications between the client and server. Without David's mentoring of Jameson Heesen, Palace Chat would likely not exist, as David shared much of his findings with Jameson, including the XOR(xtlk) encryption used to encrypt chats and generation of client registration codes, prop encoding and decoding, and so much more. Much later(circa 2010) and after numerous source code leaks, Open Palace was developed by Brian McKelvey. Jameson utilized Brian's open source Open Palace to implement scripting support into Palace Chat. Brian also spearheaded the development of Type 1 avatars, which Palace Chat adopted and continues to utilize. All of these new clients support improved high-color avatars, larger room backgrounds (also in high-color), and modern sound formats (such as MP3), and are designed for modern operating systems. However, only Palace Chat is presently maintained and is the present-day client of choice. One of the first comprehensive psychological studies of avatar communities, conducted by John Suler, took place at the Palace. This collection of essays, entitled Life at the Palace, consists of an analysis of Palace history, social relationships, "addiction," and deviance. Suler's work focused on the unique aspects of interacting via avatars and in a graphical space. Privacy Signing into The Palace does not require any registration or personal information. To begin chatting, users download the client, set their user handle and login to a server. A child filter is enabled on the client by default, which filters out chat servers with an Adult ranking and inappropriate language used in chat rooms. Other Clients PalaceChat, created by Jameson Heesen (known in the community as PaVVn), which supports all original features of The Palace, as well as high-quality backgrounds and avatars, larger rooms and videos. This is the primary client in use. Linpal, an open source Linux client using GTK+. Phalanx, primarily developed by David Lee by meticulously reverse-engineering the official client and was released by Brainhouse Laboratories. It's currently abandoned, but was the first viable alternative to the official client. Incompatible Palace-like Clients The Manor, written by a former Palace lead developer. The Manor includes embedded Python for user and room scripting with an encrypted data stream. Supports importing Palace avatars. Both new incarnations of The Palace support larger room sizes and 32-bit color avatars. Worlize, an online