Live Chat / IRC repost

[MarineCorpFarmr]

Re-posted here on Kevin565's advice, including his post and my response.

As a relatively new member, i do still look back at a lot of the older threads and i came across quite a few pertaining to byc having a live chat in the past. If there is a group of users that would use a live chat, might I offer a solution. I run a handful of irc live chats. I don't do message boards or blogs or anything of the sort, I just do chats. That being said, I do see the use of a live chat being helpful as a way to find information but i also see the need for control and moderation as this is not an age restricted site. If the users her have a real want for a live chat, I would have no problem setting up an irc & webchat directly for byc users. And after speaking with my moderators we would even provide moderation for the time being. I would love to have some input from the users and mods on this. thanks



Originally Posted by Kevin565

Agreed. Most of our chats are users from other sites and divide the chat from the site itself for those exact reasons. Our network has about 30 current mods so we have someone around nearly all of the time, we also utilize functions of irc to control content in the chat channel itself, thus taking some of the strain off the mods. Please, please feel free to ask me any questions you may have either here publicly or in pm. Thanks

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

There are ways to make a live chat room work. I know of some systems that require you to scan a copy of your driver's license, etc. to really decrease the probability of problems.

Independent of the moderation problems with a chat room, here the main reason I don't really like them: They aren't a good information storage system.

I got into forums 10 years ago because I LOVE the fact that the help is predicated on a system of "one to many". In almost all other systems you have one person helping another. In a forum you have one person helping 10, 100, 1,000, or even 100,000 others. A single answer to a single question may provide help to hundreds of thousands of people over the life of the forum. On all of my forums (I run 5 of them) I see people coming from Search Engines that looked for an answer that was posted years and years ago... it's really cool!

In chat, you loose almost all of these benefits. The information isn't stored for others to read and learn from and also isn't searched / indexed by the search engines. The value of forums, and the reason I'm still running them after 10 years, is because of the amazing value they provide indefinitely.

There definitely are some pros to chat systems, but IMO, the cons tend to outweigh the pros... at least for an information based site like we have here.

 

[MarineCorpFarmr]

Chat isn't ever meant to be a information storage system like a forum is(at least that's not how we run), but as an additional resource to a forum. One example would be our hay & crop chat linked exclusively to a hay & crop forum. Some questions just come out better in conversation vs posting. IMO some of the highlights since launching that irc have been some of the old timers taking the time to talk to a newbie and re-assure them, as well as those who learned something returning to post that knowledge on the forum. I share your opinion, on its own a chat is a lousy information database, i however do believe ran correctly it can be a good resource. Just my two cents.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

It may be something that we revisit in the future, but we found with the chat we had running for over a year that the cons just simply outweighed the pros.

 

[MarineCorpFarmr]

I have however heard some of the same issues from other boards when they have tried to double duty ie, running the chat and boards and well as mods from boards trying to moderate a chat as well. Our longest running chat has been up 6 years 4 months & 26 days. Before we took over the chat aspect they too tried to run it off the boards box and use the boards mods. I think it lasted 6 months maybe. I have found its too much of a load unless you have tons of mods active in the chat as well, but with most large forum communities that isn't the case. Food for future thought.

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

One quick item: We unfortunately can't support or allow people to advertise off-BYC chat groups. Over the years we've seen cases where these off-site chats were started with good intentions but unfortunately they all turned into a disaster. Usually it was because some people would join them pretending to be other members and then we'd get complaints and drama here. Without a chat system being directly tied to our own user-authentication system there are just too many potential problems that can (and have) erupt.

Don't worry, we'll definitely keep the discussion going with our staff regarding adding chat back to BYC and having it tied to our user-authentication system.