Are there any admin-focused chat rooms in the XF, vB or general forum admin communities? It feels like that is missing.
Not necessarily on the (any) website, but something like IRC. Surprisingly, there are still some amazingly active channels out there for the PHP community, and most other community-owned groups.
I would avoid chat rooms on your forum. The only thing its going to do is kill your post count. You don't want members talking in your chat room when they could be posting on your forum. Greg
I'm sort of divided on chats for general use for an online community, because I agree with what Greg said. However, a team chat for internal use is useful. vB.com had one for the support team and it was very useful. I bet they still have it. I think the communities revolving around PHP use chat so much because the forums available are lacking for those communities. PHPBB anyone? Yuck! One thing that is terrible on a chat is when there is more than one subject being discussed. Each reply cuts into the other discussion. Let 4 or 5 topics get discussed and it is a free-for-all. I am surprised there hasn't been a chat system (at least not that I know of) that lets discussions be forked/ started in different chat windows. Scott
Agreed. Back when I first started running boards (~2006) it seemed like a chat room or at the very least a shoutbox was damn near required to keep members happy. Most shared hosts had prohibitions against running live chat systems forcing you to go VPS before they were uber cheap. AOL Chat rooms shut down a quite a while back. Yahoo Chat shut down fairly recently. Everything seems to have gone the "circle of friends" route for example Google Hangouts. I think lots of people are scared to meet new people online with all the horror stories you hear in the news. IRC has a geeks only stigma. Even when I first got online in 98 or so it was something no one I talked to in real life knew anything about. I have XChat installed but cannot tell you the last time I launched it and hung out in a chat room.
Think a chatroom still has a use on a forum, it is better for more spontaneous chatting. Especially if you ran something like a gaming clan, or it got used as an area for members to swop details faster about something. Could be selling a license and a person asking questions about it e.t.c.
How about a discussion system, that doesn't save posts for a long time (like only for a few minutes?). Scott
