This took me forever to puzzle out, so here you go. This explains how to avoid having to fill out the stupid dialog every time you want to join a chat room in Adium. Adium is a very nice IM client on the Macintosh, much nicer than iChat.

Most (all?) the instant messaging networks also support chat rooms (sometimes called conferences, and sometimes rooms). Adium has a command for joining these chat rooms “Join Group Chat” in it’s file menu. That command pops up a complex dialog what you then fill out.
All this is good up until you discover that filling out the complex dialog is tedious and your doing it over and over again so you can stay in your chat rooms.

So here is the trick. There is a tool bar gadget to create new “buddies” for your chat rooms. It is not enabled by default. So. Once your in a chat room you need to: show the tool bar if it’s hidden; customize the tool bar; add the “bookmark” tool into your tool bar; and then use that to create a pseudo buddy. From then on in you can join a chat room by clicking on that room’s pseudo buddy.

Now, if I can only figure out how to tell these to automatically connect & reconnect.

For example there are chat rooms for each US weather district; and if you enter one of them you’ll get all the weather alerts for that district automatically. These are found in the jabber IM network at the jid muc.appriss.com, for example the boston district is known as box; and it’s room is zzboxchat. As far as I know jabber’s xmpp: uri scheme doesn’t include a syntax for denoting these chat rooms.