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Posted

The problem with the chat popularity is that you have to load up a program or new web page and actively switch between whatever it was you were looking at and the chat.

 

On paper this sounds fine and not exactly strenuous, but this is enough for people to forget or give up doing it after a time, until someone makes/bumps a topic like this which only increases its popularity temporarily. Also factor in that people often have background tabs/programs with the chat loaded but because it's not actively on their screen at the time they may not respond to messages and effectively appear AFK.

 

I think a much better way for instant chat that I have seen work better on much less popular forums is a 'shoutbox' to appear on pages of the forum. I'm sure most have seen some variation of it, and one of its best features is that it displays on the actual forum web page which means it's used a lot (in fact, everyone on the forum who is actively viewing the forum is connected to it, unless they opt to disable seeing it). That's clearly a much larger number of active users than you can hope for on IRC at one time.

 

I have mentioned this before and I think it would be at least worth a trial. They're fairly easy to setup too. :)

Posted

surely the server is having enough problems at the moment without a chat box hogging even more?

 

I try to come on the chat, but its often empty. If I stay and people chat while i'm minimised mirc doesn't notify me (like say msn does) so i end up missing the conversation anyway

Posted
surely the server is having enough problems at the moment without a chat box hogging even more?

 

I try to come on the chat, but its often empty. If I stay and people chat while i'm minimised mirc doesn't notify me (like say msn does) so i end up missing the conversation anyway

That's weird, you say that it would cause more problems then list 2 problems that the shoutbox would solve!

 

Shoutboxes are usually hosted by another site (therefore N-E server problems are irrelevant) and as I recall you simply paste a small amount of code and it appears on the page to the size/colour/position the administrator sets. Your post I think perfectly captures the general feeling of the current chat, so I think there could be a better way to implement it. Even if the shoutbox isn't considered perfect, I certainly think it's a much better way.

 

As for if anyone questionned how it could be moderated, the chat room is already part of the main site and that is open to equally the same abuse (and potential lack of moderation). It could be set so that accounts older than 6 months only can use/see it, and there's fairly easy to set limits on post length and number of posts within a set time limit. It could even be that posts are disabled in the very early hours, and with the number of moderators always around I'm sure one could delete any potentially bad posts. Although from experience these are very few and far between.

Posted

I'm not sure what the previous reasons have been, but I think shoutboxes have been decided against. Either way, I think more people should chat - it's great until people forget about it.


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