Are shoutboxes a good thing?

Well, there have been topics like this on plenty of other forum management sites, so I'm curious, what do people here think of shoutboxes and chat boxes on internet forums?

For me, while a lot of people say they lower activity, I have often seen the opposite, with cases where the shoutboxes actually cause members to post more maybe due to the sheer novelty of it, and they then decide to refuse to post when it's gone in semi protest. They do look somewhat ugly though, and I despite those flash based ones that many free forums have for similar reasons.

Your opinion?

 

I think theyre fine if your users will continue to use your forums just as much or more once its installed. I believe if a chat system is installed that it should only be accessible by your members, not like a widget chat room hosted elsewhere where anyone can access it.

I think it is also a good idea to have a certain requirement before giving members access to chat rooms on forums, it gives some incentive to become involved in the community first before going on to chatting through one of these systems.

I think theyre a fun addition only if your users will appreciate there is one and use it every day, if you have a new forum I think theyre pointless, especially with postings such as "its a bit dead in here", they are quite annoying to see especially when you first start out as what could they expect

 

I don't think shoutboxes are necessarily much of a positive or a negative; rather, they are just a minor perk that you can do without. A few things, though. My shoutbox is near the bottom of my forum's front page, just above the What's Going On? box. For all I care, the box could be even lower than that. I do not like it near the top because I want the welcome message and the forum list to catch the eye immediately, so I keep anything else out of the way.

I take care of the activity of the sections of my forum by posting new topics with my own substantive input whenever I can. The shoutbox is very much a supplement rather than a leech on forum activity because I make sure that there are plenty of interesting discussions to at least look at started or continued on a regular basis. I think the reason why it may feel like a shoutbox is sucking away activity is because there isn't much activity there in the first place.

 

I'm not a fan of them only because of the way they look.

I also think the members will post more if there is no chat.

 

They are ok, and they have their place, but they can cause high server load.

I had a shoutbox and a chat room on my forum. Because of the load, I took the shoutbox off and left the chatroom.

 

I would only install a chatbox after your forum has an active community with many members who post daily. I put a chatbox on my forum, and most of the users who use the chatbox make less posts.

 

We don't have to INSTALL any chatbox we just embed a flash based one called chatango, which is pretty much a must on my anime site.

 

How do you control who enters the chat room? Is it integrated with your members list?

 

Not much but that's why you appoint moderators.

Guests can enter as anon and you make your own account, it's a chat system in which you can use the same account to go from chat to chat. If i have an account named fullmetalbabe on pisoga.chatango.com i can use the same account on fmb.chatango.com

Bannings are by username, IP and ISP, you can delete, ban and unban anyone. Of course, only you and the moderators can do that, the users can flag anyone but themselfs, a flag is a ban for 3 hours which is something the users have power over.

 

Used to but ever since i got some high graphics gaming skins the shoutbox just looks stupid..

 

I'm not sure I like this "feature" at all. It seems that it would be too easy to abuse.

 

To me, it sounds like something just waiting to go horribly wrong (the user flag/ban thing).

 

It is, believe me, but it takes 4 people to flag one person, they get flagged for 3 hours.

If they spam, post 9 messages repeatedly in intervals of SECONDS, they get banned for 15 minutes, so it prevents spam.

Counting, it takes 4 individuals to flag one person, each individual that flags has only 3 chances to flag in an interval of one hour... pretty limited and controlled, besides, it's easy to spot a person who flags, and you can ban them for an interval of time.

Plus, you can bypass a flag if you're flagged unfairly, deemed by the admin/mod there.

Oh! and administrators and moderators can't be flagged.

 

The shoutbox seems cool, bu nto til after your community is built up, and you have a group of loyal members who wont abuse it at all.

 

The AJAX chats on Elliquiy and Blue Moon generate roughly one million php calls and ten million queries per day, along with the overwhelming majority of server load, log accesses, etc.

They don't reduce activity all that much, at least for me. They're a good way to handle new members : )