Chat Room

[tattooedjackass]

Hey guys was wondering if you have ever thought about having a Chat Room attached to the message board? We have one at the site i run and it is extreamly popular. I was thinking it would probably be something good to have esspecially on match day's adn would also save you on a lot of bandwith too.

[Louis]

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. I thought about adding a chat room a while back, believe it or not they use more server resources than the forum system alone, not that that's the reason I haven't added one. We would find moderating the chat a challenge and it would get abused (like the temp chat system I had in place when the server went down over a year ago). Additionally once a chat is done the conversation gets lost forever, with the forum system it can be read back for years to come.

[tattooedjackass]

Very true Louis you put it into a different perspective and i appreciate that, moderating can be a pain and like you said once the chat has finished thats it all gone. thanks for getting back to me on it though!

[cambgull]

I once created a chat room for a forum I used to frequent. It worked very well when you have hundreds of users browsing the forum at any one time, as you then have enough people for a decent conversation on the chat room. If you look at an average of 1 in 10 people who will actually use a chat room, then we'd likely have only one or two people on there at any one time.

During matches, a chat room would work well. However, like Louis says, you lack any records of the conversation other than conversation logs. It's sometimes fascinating to read through people's reactions to goals and major moments. Stick with what we've got, I reckon.

[tattooedjackass]

The only way i can see it being used well is a match day chat and if it was moderated from the build up and throughout the match it could then be copy and pasted into its own post and re read from there, but like wise i can see the disavantages to it too!

[cambgull]

Moderation is actually not too much of a problem, there are plenty of people who could do that, not even those who are already forum moderators. As long as similar rules are upheld on the chat room, then it's fine.

The biggest problem is that you're assuming everyone wants to use the chat room. Even among younger people, I've found at maximum, 1 in 5 people will use a chat room. That's quite a small amount. Given that we may only have 5 people at any time who frequently post on any particular match thread and a similar amount of irregular posters, the chat room would be distinctly underused. Even if it were used by 4 or 5 people, they would most likely be the regular posters and therefore, the match thread would have just a few posts from lurkers who would then get put off from bothering as they never get a reply.