Free Chatrooms: How To Spot Freaks, Geeks And Dirty Old Men

Chat rooms can be depressing little places, mostly full of horny nerds looking to fiddle with their trousers in front of something more interactive than pixilated lady bumps.

It's a MAN.

It's either a pre-teen or a MAN. Either way, tread carefully.

It's a nerd. What's more, it's an extraordinarily uncool nerd. Genuinely cool people, like The Fonz, don't need to draw attention to their coolness unless they're jumping over sharks on water-skis.

Anyone with square brackets and/ or numbers in their ‘handle' is a teenager, and as such not to be trusted. They'll spell things wrong, misuse the possessive apostrophe, and have Caps Lock FIRMLY GLUED DOWN.

Depressed nerd, who'll mope and whine about a presumably-fake girl he recently ‘finished' with. Most likely she's from a different country, and they've never actually, you know, ‘met', only in chat rooms, but it was ‘quite serious for a bit there lol'.

Desperately wants to be in a Japanese cartoon, and is frustrated that ‘real women' never quite match up or carry swords.

Will say ‘LOLOLOOLOLOLOL' a lot, and uses kisses like they mean something xxx

Definitely a teenager, definitely unable to hack anything other than 127.0.0.1.

Unnecessarily antagonistic.

Cruising for sex. Again, probably a man.

Cruising for sex. Probably a man, probably a teenager, probably a nerd. In either case, they've only got a tiny winkie.

Of course, all stereotyping is essentially little more than clandestine institutionalized racism, and not strictly-speaking true. So try to go into each and every chat room with a care-free attitude and tolerance for others, and you should do fine. Unless you're a teenager of course, in which case bugger off.