Do you have Chat Feature on Your Forum?

[Nomad]

I don't have a chat feature on my forums, I believe every discussion should be within the forum posts and not in chats or even in private messages. Even though allow private messages for the members, I encourage members to post on forums instead of interacting with private messages. I believe forums are for open discussion.

 

[Anachiwo]

I find the chat feature or shout out box as a major distraction from the forum discussion. It's the only reason why I don't buy into using it. It's an unwanted noise and I don't see the need for it. When I have is a chit-chat thread.

 

[Heatman]

I don't have it on my forum but my friend does on it own. I have engaged in casual chatting on it a few times but I don't really find it interesting if I'm being very honest.

 

[Kyng]

We used to, but we ended up replacing it with a Discord server, which offered far better functionality than any of the chat features ever did.

(Granted, that then creates the issue of trying to stop the Discord from pulling content and members away from the forum, but we've managed mostly fine!)

 

[Cory]

We too use Discord, which is a pretty small community of people at this time. We have only 4 channels, so there's not a whole lot to do on our Discord server, but the new resources tab proves to be useful for alerting people of new resources posted on the board.

 

[Heatman]

We used to, but we ended up replacing it with a Discord server, which offered far better functionality than any of the chat features ever did.

(Granted, that then creates the issue of trying to stop the Discord from pulling content and members away from the forum, but we've managed mostly fine!)

Discord is a very good platform for chatting. It's gaming that led me to using Discord in the first place and I liked it so much.

 

[Ronald]

I don't have a chat feature on my forums, I believe every discussion should be within the forum posts and not in chats or even in private messages. Even though allow private messages for the members, I encourage members to post on forums instead of interacting with private messages. I believe forums are for open discussion.

I am in support of your decision and get the rationale behind it. However, in some cases, the nature of the conversation could be personal, and this would only be shared through private messages. You might want to take this into consideration.

 

[Georgeadawara]

Due to the fact that I don't have a forum of my own, but seriously creating a place for chat or private message is a nice idea, to share though among individual.

 

[Immilash]

I don't have a forum at the moment, but I believe that will be a good idea, chat option us very good on forum it helps people go communicate with others.

 

[Phabbyfundz]

Most forums I have been has the chat feature, this is good for messages that are personally outside the normal conversations on the forum to be discussed between members.

 

[Daniel-cash]

Chat features is not necessary for forum. I have not even come across a forum that have it. Communication is a means of passing out information. And that's what forum brings. If there's need to have private message, you can message the particular member directly. So with this, chat feature is not necessary.

 

[Shortie]

I used to have a chat feature as well as a shout box on my forums years ago, but I found that people would much rather use those than post around the forums and it left the forums to die which was not something I wanted at all. I eventually removed the shout box and the chat feature we had and made it so that the only place for discussions was within the forums. Activity soon picked up and the members were happy to keep posting around the forums rather than in the shout box and the chat.