I feel like with our "younger" crowd here (if you get my reference) we may use it more
I'd be inclined to agree....
The live chat is a option...
IT was brought up early on but... I know the other site has it and no one uses it..
and any useful info is not stored..
But we can table this again
**IF** you're willing to run it through an IRC server, live chat is easy.
we used to use it over at "the other site" but, everyone expected to be able to pop in, ask questions, then bailed as soon as they didn't get a response in 15-30 seconds. I would think the laid back crew here would understand how a chat would work better than "the other site" did.
as far as useful info not being stored...I have solutions for that, and am more than willing to help out. You run an eggdrop bot in the IRC channel and it logs the chat, as it logs the chat, you could pull that info into a forum thread, it just wouldn't tie to specific users, nor would it likely be easy to tie each line of text from each chatter to every user individually.
if you're down for giving it a try, I'll do my best to help set it up for the site, and community as a whole.
It hasn't worked on that other site since before I had joined, which was last summer. I think the new owners killed it when they took over....
I second the chatbox idea.
again, see the above remark about the mentality of the other site and its chat. Fangars/Xoskel and I did our best to keep the chat alive, and for quite a while, we were the admins/mods for the chat site.
When we discussed the chat box idea earlier on we brought up the issue of moderating such a thing and how difficult it would be.
moderating it is **CAKE** if you roll through an IRC based system, I could teach ya'll how to do that within 15-30 minutes at most.
if you run a java or flash based "chatbox", the arguements above about difficulty of implementation, moderation, and everything else then become 100% valid.
the advantage to run with the IRC based system, is the fact that mobile users can log a client into the chat and directly access that, just like we can via forumrunner/tapatalk...
I like having a chat option, it'd be much like the post whore thread, except realtime with no delay from post to post in responding to things...