Chat, forum addition.

[tasmod]

John mentioned he was thinking of adding a chat function to the forum.

I have just done that on a forum I run and it seems to be working OK. It's the Ajax chat mod.

I think this would be a good addition to the forum and can at least be trialled.

[Flash]

A chat would have to be moderated 24/7 to keep it from degenerating into useless bickering with a lot of hurt feelings. Count me out.

[tlchost]

A chat would have to be moderated 24/7 to keep it from degenerating into useless bickering with a lot of hurt feelings. Count me out.

So....find some folks who have moderating skills and who would volunteer.

[jpeps]

A chat would have to be moderated 24/7 to keep it from degenerating into useless bickering with a lot of hurt feelings. Count me out.

I'm curious...is there any hard evidence that people are damaged without protection & supervision? I've never heard of anyone dying from reading a distasteful comment.

[pemasu]

#258908 +(15034)- [X]
<Ben174> : If they only realized 90% of the overtime they pay me is only cause i like staying here playing with Kazaa when the bandwidth picks up after hours.
<ChrisLMB> : If any of my employees did that they'd be fired instantly.
<Ben174> : Where u work?
<ChrisLMB> : I'm the CTO at LowerMyBills.com
*** Ben174 (BenWright@TeraPro33-41.LowerMyBills.com) Quit (Leaving)

Not quite dying....but....

[tasmod]

LOL,

[nooby]

We would either die out of rolling on the floor holding our aching stomach
in place or die out of embarrassment for something too funny we say not knowing English grammar well enough to avoid stumbling all over whatever.

[JohnMurga]

I'm curious...is there any hard evidence that people are damaged without protection & supervision? I've never heard of anyone dying from reading a distasteful comment.

No, however, at the moment we do have people who would be dying to post distasteful comments and bring into disrepute anything that we try to introduce.

So although no one would actually die (I hope) from reading the "distasteful comment", it may go some way towards sabotaging the initiative.

So at the very least we would need people willing to make sure this didn't happen.

But first I have to make this functionality available, which is something I will have a go at some point.

Cheers
John de Murga

[jpeps]

I'm curious...is there any hard evidence that people are damaged without protection & supervision? I've never heard of anyone dying from reading a distasteful comment.

No, however, at the moment we do have people who would be dying to post distasteful comments and bring into disrepute anything that we try to introduce.

So although no one would actually die (I hope) from reading the "distasteful comment", it may go some way towards sabotaging the initiative.

So at the very least we would need people willing to make sure this didn't happen.

Good luck trying On a public forum, it's probably best to avoid power struggles to begin with. Accepting that there are dysfunctional people in the world seems to work much better.

[tasmod]

The chat would be only visible to signed in members of the forum, in the case of my forum it's at the bottom of the threads in a separate window area.

I can see the need for trusted mods on the chat from around the world and with time to spare for this forum.

However I do feel there is a sense of self discipline involved, knowing you have to be signed in and you cannot create a nickname to hide behind.

I'm lucky in this respect, I run the forum on behalf of a club and it is 'hidden' as far as the general public is concerned as there is an opening 'sign in' window for members only. All members are vetted before activation. (Bot sub attempts still are a pain though)

The forum is bang up to date at phpBB 3.0.9. I do update automatically when it needs to.

[JohnMurga]

Good luck trying On a public forum, it's probably best to avoid power struggles to begin with. Accepting that there are dysfunctional people in the world seems to work much better.

I really don't understand what you mean, where power struggles come in ?

Just because we accept (and embrace) that there are dysfunctional people around doesn't have to mean that we have to allow them to intimidate or otherwise harm others.

And unfortunately when there are people determined to do that you need some way to guard against it.

We have a group of very dedicated people looking after the forum, so luck has nothing to do with it

Cheers
John de Murga