Of course, before we can ever configure our chat room we must first have created one. There are two types of room: an instant room and a reserved room. An instant room is created by the owner and it immediately allows others to join and start chatting. A reserved room is created and locked until configured by the owner.

The initial stages of creating a room are exactly the same with the creator (who becomes the owner) sending a presence stanza to the JID of the room they wish to create. So let's continue with our above example and say Biff would like to create the gang chat room at Lou's café:

<presence from='[email protected]/lous' 
to='[email protected]/biff'> 
<x xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/muc'/> 
</presence> 

The server could respond in a couple of ways, but let's imagine a first example that Biff would not be very pleased with:

<presence from='[email protected]/biff' 
to='[email protected]/lous'> 
  <error by...