Prat has been a fan favorite as far as chat mods go for quite awhile now, with the ability to change just about whatever you want with your chat frame plus some added features like item links in custom channels.

Now, from the author of Omen comes Chatter. Built with the intent of making a chat mod with less bloat and is lighter on overall system resources, it manages to do that quite well. All I ever used in Prat was the module to allow links in custom channels, so I decided to give Chatter a try. The switch over wouldn't be too hard, right? Just turn off all of the modules I don't want, leave item links on.

I was pleasantly surprised with how easily Chatter was configured. I had decent looking, functional chat windows ready to go in about ten minutes. I'll fully admit that most other chat mods probably shouldn't take me much longer than that, but things that drastically alter my UI are my kryptonite. I think that says something about how simple this mod is to configure.

It lives! Yes, indeed. As promised in my recent appearance in About the Bloggers, the leads of WoW Insider and I have finally worked out scheduling and the like to bring back two of the posts you've been asking for -- Reader UI of the Week and Reader WoWspace of the Week! From now on, you'll see Reader UI appearing on Sunday, and Reader WoWspace coming to you on Tuesday, just in time to help shake those downtime blues. But enough with the promotion, let's get on with the show!

This week's Reader UI of the Week comes to us courtesy of Adoru, level 60 Night Elf Rogue of "It Hurts when I PvP" on Sen'Jin. (Bonus points for the lolworthy guild name!) Adoru not only sent in a fantastic breakdown of all the mods involved in this week's Reader UI and the reasons for building it, (hint, hint) but additionally sent us a bunch of screenshots to choose from! So without further ado, here's your long-awaited (and hopefully welcomed-back) Reader UI of the Week.

While my WoW UI modifications don't give me an UberL33t look, they do provide a clean, consistent and usable interface. It's a work in process that never ends -- but I think it is coming along nicely. I started with a set of goals and they have been met for the most part:

For this week's edition of Reader UI of the Week, we're featuring a pretty swank layout designed by Kirrina, L70 Night Elf Hunter of <Kiss of Ysera> from Emerald Dream, EU. For those of you curious of all the mods at work on this setup, here's what Kirrina had to say:

The focus here is to clear the majority of my screen so that I can just enjoy the game, seeing the really rather nice graphics that Blizz have made the effort to produce. I'm the raid leader in our Karazhan raids, so I also need to see how the raid is doing, have the healers got enough mana, who's targeting who and so on.

It's the end of the day (or nearly there) and, if you've logged on at all, you've patched WoW up to the latest version. Oftentimes, patch days are fraught with server instability and all sorts of other issues in game. On top of those problems, UI mods get thrown out of whack and usually must be updated in order to avoid screens filled with annoying error messages.

Personally, this patch day was one of the smoothest I can recall in recent memory. Once the servers came back up, I was able to log on right away with no queue and no apparent latency. As the afternoon wore on into evening, there were a few rough patches of lag, but they smoothed out after a little while, never to return. My most important mods were already updated and I can live without the rest for a couple of days. I purposefully try to avoid a reliance on UI mods, which is always helpful on patch days, so I'm not sure that my experience was shared by many other WoW players. Even so, my guildmates who rely on mods more than I do also seemed pretty happy with the transition to the new patch, so hopefully things went well for the majority of WoW fans. How did the patch treat you today? Did you bother logging on at all? If you did, have you had a good experience thus far?

Ahh, patch week. You know the time-honored dance by now: enable your outdated mods, and log in to see what explodes. As many of my guild-mates and I were discussing on Tuesday, different classes really have different UI needs. I know when I used to run my Mage as my raiding main, Decursive was one of the biggest mods that I simply couldn't live without. Now that I've shifted to my Rogue as my raiding main, it's a whole different ballgame mod-wise. (I couldn't even tell you the last time I thought about Decursive.) As such, I thought I'd take this patch week to open the floor to the discussion between Rogues of what mods are absolutely crucial for us, and what mods are just "nice to have."