Website Migration

We have started the anticipated website migration process.

SmS Zimbabwe decides to move the website to the USA to improve performance and lower our costs. Bandwidth in Zimbabwe is too costly.

It’s becoming a tricky balancing act just to keep the site up and running each day and we would
like to thank our big brothers YoAfrica for sponsoring bandwidth and a lot of ideas on how to
tackle the problems we are facing.

We have since moved the Chat and Forum to the USA host and also setup a mirror Chat in Zimbabwe to make it fast for members accessing the chatroom from Zimbabwe

Please bear with us during this migration process, things might not work correctly and you might see annoying errors due to the migration process. A lot of our back and front ends had undergone modifications for this migration.

Once again thanks for the support and your patience.

Team SMS

SmS Chat

SmS Zimbabwe is proud to release yet another innovation for Zimbabwe's online advancement.

Introducing one of the most sophisticated chatrooms in the world coupled with a web messenger .
SmS Zimbabwe Chat offers

• Multi-room capability -- Users can enter more than one room to chat with other users.
• Private messages -- Users can send private messages to other users without opening a private window.
• Private Rooms -- When a user creates a private room, no other user can enter it, unless they were invited by the room owner.
• Whisper -- Allows sending a private message to someone. No other users in the room will see the message.
• Compelling end-user experience -- SmS Chat has one of the easiest and most intuitive user interfaces ever created. Its unique set of features include rich text, image emoticons, sound effects, user selected fonts, text and avatar icons, and more.
• Fast response time even on a slow connection -- Only relevant information is transferred between client browser and the chat sever and only when some action by either side is required, providing for superior performance.
• Avatars support -- Unique user avatars allow users choose an Avatar character icon to represent him/her in the chat room
• Customizable Public & Private messages -- Allows users change font name, style, size, and color of public and/or private messages.
• Graphical emoticons. -- Sometimes, one image costs thousands words.
• Save the transcript -- Users are able to save the complete chat transcript.
• Sound Effects -- Sounds play when a new message is received or someone enters the room
• Away Feature -- Away Feature is useful when stepping away from the keyboard for a few minutes, need to answer the phone or concentrate on a private conversation so you aren't available for chat.
• Ignore function -- Allows the chat users use the "Ignore" function against online harassment from one or more other users. This will prevent the user from receiving messages from the ignored user(s).

So what you waiting for?

REGISTER NOW!

http://chat.sms.co.zw

for Zimbabwe by Zimbabweans

Improved loading speeds.

Part of the www.SmS.co.zw website has been relocated to New-Zealand.

Due to the popularity, SmS has been serving people from all over the world, most members visiting SmS on a hourly basis, we have already over 2000 registerd members and growing on a steady increase rate everyday. Hence the loading speeds decreased significatnly because of the bandwidth constraints we face in Zimbabwe.

So we have moved part of www.SmS.co.zw to New-Zealand last night.

Website core still remain in Harare Zimbabwe.

We are already making plans to move www.SmS.co.zw site to USA where Bandwidth is UNLIMITED to improve your experience at SmS.

Team SmS

Improved Stability

We have put in more input validation to our front end and tweaked a lot of the backend to improve our sites stability. Our system would easily get confused when users put invalid information e.g. instead of puting one email they eneter 2 and one of them is invalid.

we also tweaked the user interface a bit and added the zim flag as the icon.

Due to overwelming succes we are in the process of upgrading a lot of our infrastructure to handle currrent and future demand.

Regards

Team SMS

Why is SmS Free?

Team SmS live to believe that 'some' things in life should be free besides fresh air, especially during hard times.

Why should we be like OTHER COUNTRIES who pay for online SmS? we are zimbabweans, we are unique and surely being the country with the highes literacy rate in the whole world, we should definitely show 'them' what it means to be Zimbabweans
thus our slogan BY ZIMBABWE FOR ZIMBABWEANS

SmS Zimbabwe is proud to kill 2 birds with 1 stone.

1- Allowing anyone in the whole world to send free sms to Zimbabweans

2- Creating a new era in corporate advertising.

SmS Zimbabwe is sponsord by Hammer and Tongues Auctioneers in Zimbabwe

SmS you send is 100% free
but may from time to time carry a small advert
for Hammer and Tongues Auctioneers
www.auctioneers.co.zw

Hammer and Tongues Auctioneers
Supporting Zimbabwe's Online Advancemnet

When our hammer falls the market Jumps!

Network Status Notification

Yet another ground breaking inovation by SmS Zimbabwe

Our network status notification picks up the network condition of our mobile networks and displays at the top right corner of our website.


Now you will be able to pick out the current network conditions at SmS Zimbabwe at any given time

Excellent Network Condition


Fair Network Conditions'


NO NETWORK



When there is no network, you can still send SmS as normal but it might be slightly delayed depending on when the network gets back to normal

SmS Zimbabwe has implemented one of the most sophisticated programming concepts to gaurantee SmS delivery. Making sure no sms is lost in the woods during poor network situations

Join our forum http://forum.sms.co.zw and post your views and comments towards SmS Zimbabwe Project

Team SmS

Photo Gallery Released

SmS Zimbabwe is proud to announce that our PHOTO GALLERY has been released on a public beta, each account has its own personal photo gallery with unlimited webspace

What you waiting for? Get UPLOADING!!

you will find your gallery under PROFILES section

Team SmS
by zimbabwe for zimbabweans

Online Campaigns

Our Advert on
www.herald.co.zw
www.mweb.co.zw
www.zol.co.zw

Our online campaigns are going on as planned, and the responses are overwhelming.

Thank you guys for the support.

You could play a part in our campaigns by simply telling all your friends about this new ground breaking innovation by Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans

Team SmS

We have WON the first of many battles to come

I think we can safely say we have won the first of many battles to come against a small group of people who have made it their mission to scare people from our website with baseless arguments like information is been stored in databases. All websites like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail store your information in a database that’s why you can use the same password to get in each time and find your contact list, profile and personal settings the way you last left them.

The other most ridiculous argument to discredit us was that we are using reverse billing yet this is not possible in Zimbabwe and we have limited our service to delivering messages only to the 3 Zimbabwean mobile operators. Over 2000 messages have already been sent through our site and no one has been reversed billed.

Others have even said our site is not secure yet we have asked so many of our big respected brothers in the industry to hack our site they used an assortment of techniques from SQL injection to remote scripting and they have all failed and given us their seals of approval.

We also feel the criticism is unwarranted because we have clearly stated that we are still in Beta and proved it day in and day out with new exciting features that observant regular users will notice each day. We have also publicly solicited for ideas from Zimbabwe and created a platform for people to suggest what they want to see in the system to make it a truly Zimbabwean solution.

We are growing each day averaging 70 new registrations and rising.

I guess we are too good to be true and this small section of critics can not come to grips with the fact that young Zimbabweans can do something and make a difference in this world when they put their minds to it.

To everyone who has registered all we can say is thank you for giving us a chance to prove ourselves we are far from perfect but we are willing to listen and do our best to never let you down and make sure you get the best possible user experience on your site SmS.co.zw.

We are currently trying to make our system more intelligent to pick up information like when our service provider is down and warn users that their message might take longer than normal to be delivered. We could even go a step further and make it notify our service proved through an email to help speed up the process.

We are also building a crawler and hope to make SmS.co.zw a search engine as well I don’t think we can reach the dizzy heights of Google but we can show the world we have what it takes.

Please Join our FORUM to post all your compliments, suggestions or complaints

http://forum.sms.co.zw/forum_posts.asp?TID=16




Team
SmS Zimbabwe

Shorthand

Forum Post by Duncan

http://forum.sms.co.zw/forum_posts.asp?TID=16

Excelent Site!

Well done to the sms.co.zw team. I've joined the site recently and I think it would be a good idea to add more slang or shorthand to the system- some words aren't shortened like should/shud come/cum would/wud like/lyk time/tym...etc.

Thanks, we will definitely add these slang / shorthand words onto our 'ShortHand' system right away

Anyone with more or other slang / shorthand words? please post comments here with your slangs'

Bug Fixed

Bug Reported by Billard

As soon as an sms is successfully sent, the SMSs remaining counter
should immediately reduce by one. Its only reducing later after clicking
some buttons.

-------------

This bug has been fixed.

Thank you for supporting www.SmS.co.zw

We are working on new features in the background -

Will keep you posted on the progress on the blog

Latest Fear

Latest Fear
The latest fear we have herd is some users are scared to send messages because they think recipients will be charged for the message.

This is not true and none of the local service providers has the framework in place to do that anyway making it completely impossible.

SmS.co.zw is 100% free so get texting

5 SmS timeframe explained

Thank you for all the support guys,

each account is given 5 free sms in every 4 hours.
zimbabwe time
Batch 1 ) 5am - 9am you are credited with 5 sms
Batch 2 ) 9am - 1pm you are credited with 5 sms
Batch 3 ) 1pm - 5pm you are credited with 5 sms
Batch 4 ) 5pm - 9pm you are credited with 5 sms
Batch 5 ) 9pm - 1am you are credited with 5 sms
Batch 6 ) 1am - 4am you are credited with 5 sms

NOT 5 free sms a day.

we had to set this little restriction becuase there are naughty people out there who would spoil things if it was not restricted, sms are paid in full amount by our sponsors, we will try our best to keep companies sponsoring the free sms service.

5 SmS batches are for standard users, we will be seting up a new system to filter the most supportive users on SmS.co.zw and give them 10 or even 20 sms batches per timeframe (4 hrs)

there are many ways to be supportive of our site

1- inviting all your friends to join SmS.co.zw by clicking INVITE FRIENDS after you log in.

2- be a 'loud' user in our forums

3- uploading photos and completing your profiles

4- having as many friend connections in your friends sections as possible

5 - by sending private messages to users on SmS.co.zw



new features coming soon

1 - SmS fun section

2 - Personal Photo Gallery

3 - Friend search section

4 - A photo PhoneBook

we are always working on improving sms.co.zw and adding as many features as possible, and please let us know of any features you might need on sms.co.zw

Team SmS