We should seriously have a chat room. There are consistently tons of people on here at one time. Is it even possible? Do we have one I dont know about? What about bandwith consumption?
yes, it is possible... a friend of mine has his own forum, had a chat room in it as well. up to Stefan though.. if he wants to add it.
Hard to say how a chat room would do here. I've moderated chat rooms for other sites in the past, and ran one on my own site in '03 and '04 that was heavily promoted by the forum it was on over at 4cycle.com. Took a while initially for people to get used to chatting in real time, but we had 20-30 people a night chatting for a about a year there from mid '03 - mid '04. We never had any regular users during the day, but around 5:30-6 P.M. every night, people would start flooding in, the evening crew. Then around 8-9 those people would leave and other regulars would join the room and stay to 12 or 1 A.M.. Last person would usually leave between 12 and 1 A.M. and then there would be nobody in the room again all day until 5:30 or 6 the next night. Always seemed to follow that pattern. It started dropping off in fall of 2004, and I ended up shutting it down all together when I shut down my site in '06. It was fun.
Isn't it a pain to moderate it though Jamie? Just a question, I've never done anything like that myself.
Well, it can be. On this site, I don't think there would be nearly as many, if any conflicts at all like we had. When I was running the one on my site, I started out watching it every night, but I was 16 at the time and found out quick it wasn't really realistic to do that every single night, I had other stuff to get out and do, wasn't going to sit at home on the computer every night LOL. After a few conflicts broke out and I wasn't there to do anything, I ended getting three people who were there nearly every night that were long time users on the regular forum, and gave them the user name and password for the admin name (there was an invisible name where you could go in and boot people out and stuff) to the chat room, told them if there were any problems, use it. That worked well for me, though obviously you would want something a little more official then that for a room that is truly an extension of the forum on the same site.
Well...Maverick chat rooms have existed for a really long time actually. The one I believe sees the most use is over at Matt's site: www.fordmaverick.com. I might as well plug my own as well. I have chat rooms I built years ago at my site: www.maverickcomet.com. They are old, but functional. I know there have been others as well, but I don't think I've ever visited any of them... It seems people get interested in the chat room idea every couple years and lots of people participate and then interest drops off and then only a few of us diehards hang out in the chat room...
One of the main reasons why I wont add one is that its resource intensive. Dave, I remember chatting with you when this site had a chat room in the 90s! Great links for all your chatting needs.
I don't know if its the same or not but something that has seemed pretty popular on some other sites is a shoutbox, integrated in to the main forums page. I don't know how resource intensive it is, I think it may be an add in for the forum software...
