Chat box?

aarrrrgggghhh. nooooooooo. We had lots of discussions on this, and the majority were "Eh gads no"

The thing about the "shout box" is you can't really monitor it all the time, and literally anything could end up on there. If for example someone took to bullying another person, on a shoutbox we wouldn't be able to do much about it, whereas on a forum, we could see what was going on, and then sort it out. In addition, for more serious topics, other people can re-read the advice given whenever, whereas useful info might be lost on a "shoutbox".

There's still the fact that someone could get very upset through something that is said on it, plus someone has to read through an eternity of spam to check nothing bad has been said, because that's all that'll get put on it spam >.> nothing of any relevance or use what so ever

HI!!! IS ANYONE THERE??? I'M BORED! LOLOLOL

That's a major argument - in our experience, chat boxes just lead to contributions of no substance

This:

HI!!! IS ANYONE THERE??? I'M BORED! LOLOLOL

This is pretty much what I see on most chatboxes.

The reason I enjoy posting on the Jitty is because of it's well moderated forum, that really doesn't need moderating too much because most of it's users use it the way that it should be used. There are great discussion topics, and the last thing I need to worry about is poking someone, accepting friend invitations, liking a thread or updating my relationship status. It's a discussion forum not an online profile.

The Jitty also aims to introduce new members and promote internet security, and I personally feel a chat box or a like button would be taking it one step away from that.

The problem is that we're adding more and more requirements for bans and moderation, which would involve modifying all user accounts to have that extra property and then actually carrying out the moderation... and we still have to be convinced that anything good will come from it

What is it that makes you think it'll be a good idea? As in - why would you actually want one and what would it be used for?

I'm just intrigued as I'm not sure what benefit it would bring to the forum personally

Modified once, last modified by jvickyb on Mon 10th January, 2011 @ 2:36pm

Its taken me three days to spot this thread, I fear moderating a chat box would be slow from me

I'm still not entirely sure how a shoutbox would be any better than private messaging if you're just wanting users to talk to each other - surely users could just send a PM to each other to chat etc. Not sure I see why it would benefit to talk in public really. Also confused how chatbox is going to reduce spam? Might have lost your train of thought with that one though

You do say it would be easy enough to moderate etc.. but I think you're failing to consider the commitment it would take to moderate from the relatively small mod and admin team we have. With a forum, yes people can post at any time, but for the most part a mod will generally pick it up some time later without any harm really being done. With a chatbox you'd need someone to be pretty much permanently reading the whole thing, which I imagine for the most part would be just spam of people chatting etc. Most of the mod and admin team are volunteer students or have full time jobs etc. I'm at University atm in my final year - so I know personally (and probably speaking for most people!) I don't think I'd have time to constantly check the forums or read through a whole days worth of 'chat' to see if anything awry was going on.

The forum is good in that you can go away for a few days and come back and all the posts are still there to be read and looked at in your own time.

I guess because I'm looking at it from a mod prospective it generally seems like it would be much more hassle than it would be worth because I'm still struggling to see the benefits really.