something that just came to my mind: what about a chat room for the forum?
we have had good experiences with a chat room on terradreams.de - both as a quick source for help and a great enrichment for the community.
i don't know about what it needs to host a chat room, but it can't be that hard.
what do you think?
Previous discussion on this topic: http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=5691.0
- Oshyan
hm, nevermind!
i must have missed that one. :D
I still think it would be great to have! Yes! Absolutely!
Yea there's something to be said for instant communication. When two people are on the same level quite a lot can be learned. It just doesn't feel the same to post on a forum. besides chats are always fun ;D
Seth used to have one, I think it's been removed from his site now, though. It was good for a while but there weren't many regulars. The forum is a bit busier nowadays though, I think, lots of new faces. Might be worth another go...
I'd love to use it as well :)
i remember there was a chat room on NWDA for a short time, never actually got to use it, though
i figured frank took it down at some point or another.
yeah I took it down because it was too tough for people to meet anyone. Only a few people knew of it and were at one point tired of hanging around the chat room as the only person.
The forums here always have around 30 people on concurrently, so there will be much more probability to meet someone.
If a TG chat, then it has to be on this site.
yah, i totally understand that, chatting globally can be tough
Quote from: FrankB on November 05, 2010, 08:57:12 AM
yeah I took it down because it was too tough for people to meet anyone.
Quote from: FrankB on November 05, 2010, 08:57:12 AM
yeah I took it down because it was too tough for people to meet anyone. Only a few people knew of it and were at one point tired of hanging around the chat room as the only person.
The forums here always have around 30 people on concurrently, so there will be much more probability to meet someone.
If a TG chat, then it has to be on this site.
If I remember correctly(??) Oshyan wasn't really fond of the idea of having a chat here.
My opinion is that eventually if everybody here wants it that it should be implemented, but then more people should chime in to the discussion and show their support for it.
I did have a chatroom on my werbsite, but it was almost always empty and people had some problem to get the good time to meet each others ^^
i still think it was a good idea though ^^
http://www.7thcircle.fr/shoutbox.html
it was a simple shoutbox...
so if some people want to use it again, go ahead, or if you have better chatroom solution, feel free to do so... ^^
Great, it still lives! :)
My perspective on this hasn't really changed. It's clear there is a good deal of interest (though mostly from "the regulars" it seems?), and it's something we will consider for that reason. But a large part of the importance and value of this place is as a learning resource for others, so preserving the discussion and making it easily searchable after the fact is highly important. If there is a "chat" approach that can address that I'd be in favor of it and wouldn't hesitate to implement. But we also don't want to be dealing with 1000's of lines of "idle chatter" to be sifted through for worthwhile info. The problem is that, while chat may be "mostly" non-critical stuff, inevitably there will be useful, important, insightful things discussed there, and if we don't archive it, we lose it, yet if we attempt to archive it all, we'll have too much that is not useful to sift through for the good stuff. How to solve this?
- Oshyan
what about a time limited experiment, Oshyan?
I wouldn't archive anything from the chat at all. People will make posts to the forums when a nice conclusion or idea came from a chat worthwhile doing it. If not, it wasn't all that important most of the time.
Regards,
Frank
I just don't have the same faith that you do that people, having already hashed out and discussed an idea in real-time chat, would then bother to go enter it into e.g. the forum or wiki. It's a relative minority that do that for the wiki already, and that's a tool to further distill the sometimes lengthy forum discussions that we would certainly like people to use more. Introducing a chat would seem to further invite fragmentation.
That being said yes, we could run an experiment. But how do we know nothing is being lost? And, having expressed this concern now, certainly people will be more conscious of it, at least initially. But in the long-term?
Nonetheless I will start looking into SMF chat systems to see what is available...
- Oshyan
i actually think that most of the people would concede if your concerns would verify.
but i'm almost sure that most of the stuff that would be discussed there will rather fit the description "random" ;)
also, some great idea or concept would be share in the forum. lets give it a try. :)
Mind if I suggest an internal chat system inside Terragen 2 itself like Mojoworld have?
It could be great to have beginners/newcomers learn from the experts/professionals to guided through the program and their own projects live while using it and also to share info on whats wrong with their scene and what can be improved on it as well.
This is only my own opinion and I would let you guys know what you think. ;D
I always found the Mojovox feature very interesting and was surprised to see it as a core part of their app strategy. It did seem to work pretty well for Mojo. I'm not so sure we'd add something like that as we do have a great community here already and it has that nice side-effect of being well logged, searchable, and contributing to our site's Internet relevancy and keyword searches. But Mojovox does illustrate the potential benefits of chat...
- Oshyan