An improvement on The Hive forum.

[ravengoescaw]

I recently in deciding to add a second army to my collection, found another forum. The Dark City. They have a chat on the main page of their forum. The people on the forum use this to socialize and ask simple questions, instead of starting a whole thread for a simple question. The chat is through chatango. I think this will enhance The Hive forum. Hopefully others will feel the same. Thus improving this forum.

[t⊗theark]

You can bookmark threads.

[ravengoescaw]

Oct 7, 2012 6:00:42 GMT t⊗theark said:

You can bookmark threads.

I didn't realize what that was thank you I will edit remove that idea.

[Overread]

We've had chats before in the past. They tend to be the kind of things that comes in waves - they become popular for a period of time, but unless they exist as their own resource they can fast become rather underpopulated. They can also be tricky things as not everyone is in the same timezone so sometimes the chat will only "work" during certain hours.

In the past the chats for the hive were all independent so lacked an onsite link (there was a thread, but no actual link on the sites structure) so often new people would miss them. I doubt you'll see a chat setup by the Hive staff as one concern is moderation - its rather demanding to have mods for a chat since things move very fast and you really need a mod in there all the time if you want to ensure that you keep order.

[Psychichobo]

Yeah, the impermanent nature of chats means people can't all join in discussions. There's a lot of useful things you can learn from a single thread that is continuously contributed to over long periods of time.

[Trygon]

TTH is too big for an on site chat system. It would just be constantly flooded.

[Loplod]

We used to have one, It was in Hellbreakers sig.

when he changed it the URL was lost forever goodbye all my old friends you will be missed.

[Hellbreaker]

Oct 8, 2012 6:43:00 GMT Loplod said:

We used to have one, It was in Hellbreakers sig.

when he changed it the URL was lost forever goodbye all my old friends you will be missed.

I'm so rude.

As far as I know TTH doesn't support a live chat, ProBoards probably don't even have the software support.

[engangsgrill]

Wouldn't it be better to simply have an official IRC channel somewhere? Most embedded forum chats blows chunks compared to using even the simplest of IRC clients.

[Overread]

Oct 7, 2012 18:13:12 GMT Trygon said:

TTH is too big for an on site chat system. It would just be constantly flooded.

I've seen bigger sites support a chat- normally breaking it up into a couple of chat rooms for topics.

[yoritomo]

I'd like to point out that we are a forum, not a chat room.

We had a big chatroom debate a while back when a couple of guys decided to make a chatroom and get the forum to adopt it. We (the moderating crew) were against it then and are still against it now.

In order to keep an eye on a chatroom and moderate it to the standard here on the Hive you'd need to have someone watching it almost all the time. We just don't have the manpower for that. Then look at who would use it, mostly it would be people who frequent the General board. And while making life easier for those of you here, it does not contribute to our overall goal of making better tyranid players.

But let's pretend for a moment that it is only used to ask simple questions and get quick replies, is that a good thing? On the surface yes, but let's look deeper. One of the things a healthy forum has is thread creation. You need people to keep making threads so the new people know the forum is active. If people use the chat function to ask questions instead of starting threads then you get old threads on the boards. This makes the forum look stale and turns off new members, which ends up killing the forum (and the chatroom).

People starting threads for simple questions is actually a good thing. Our goal is to teach tyranid players. That starts out with asking questions and then teaching people enough so that they can start to answer the questions of others. By starting new threads for these simple questions you give more people a chance to answer that question and even add to the answers of others. Plus a thread gives you more of a chance to explane and elaborate on your answer.

Anyway, that's my take on it. To date nobody has given me a good enough argument to make me rethink my position.

[Trygon]

Oct 8, 2012 7:43:55 GMT Hellbreaker said:

Oct 8, 2012 6:43:00 GMT Loplod said:

We used to have one, It was in Hellbreakers sig.

when he changed it the URL was lost forever goodbye all my old friends you will be missed.

I'm so rude.

As far as I know TTH doesn't support a live chat, ProBoards probably don't even have the software support.

Actually, whilst Proboards doesn't have a live chat, you can add it in yourself in the Headers and Footers. NewGen used Chatango, which is easily the best free chat box out there feature wise, so if you are after a chat box for any of your own projects use that. And this is coming from someone that had a premium chat box from cbox.

[yoritomo]

Actually TT, since you steped down ProBoards has added a live chat function. It's through AddonInteractive and I couldn't tell you much past that becuase, well, I'm not in favor of adding live chat to the forum at this time.

[Trygon]

Ah yes, forgot about that. I don't pay much attention to their news, but I just looked at the AA of the site I am currently running and lo and behold. I'd still not add it. All forum default chat boxes tend to be pretty basic and really clunky.