Should forums have a Chatroom?

[Arantor]

if there was a chat, I'd most likely just post in there what I've got to say.

There is a Discord for this site, though it's not super obvious how to actually join it...

 

[Strawberry]

There is a Discord for this site, though it's not super obvious how to actually join it...

I don't use Discord, so that wouldn't interest me. I just meant in terms of shoutboxes that are usually on a forum index.

 

[Arantor]

Unfortunately those went out of fashion even sooner than forums did because they ate up resources on hosts faster than anything else.

 

[Cedric]

Shoutboxes are only useful for saying hello and goodbye. Other than that they serve no purpose on most boards. And while that is all possible in a single thread, I’d rather have it that way than fill the index page with another widget.

 

[otis booard]

For me it depends on how the chatroom interacts with the rest of the forum

 

[Heatman]

Majority use Discord for this as a companion to the site rather than one hosted on the site in the old-fashioned cbox/shoutbox manner, but yes, it's very much the norm for that.

I'm all for the use of Discord than the old-fashioned shoutbox hosted on the forum. It looks messy in my opinion. I have never liked the sight of it.

 

[Arantor]

What about the sites that used to use Titan to embed Discord onto the site? (Titan is now discontinued, I haven't seen if anyone's replaced it yet)

 

[ZandraJoi]

Chat rooms can be beneficial similar to a Shoutbox. I feel it can help when people want to talk back & forth without upping their post count artificially. However, I also know it’s a personal preference to many forums. I have a Shoutbox but I mainly use it to say Good Morning & Good Night so people know I’m active on my own forum.

 

[Kale]

I used to be part of a website that used Bribble as their chat software for the longest time and when they closed down, we moved over to Tufat. That is definitely taking me back!

Truth. I loved Tufat Flashchat back then! I was a mod of only one site that used it until it closed down. I then saw 123flashchat came out and never did get to moderate on any site that used it.

 

[synpastel]

If a chatbox is conviently at the top or bottom of the website (like ye-old-cbox days), I like it. It's convient, no pressure to use, easy to talk back and forth with members. Until discord has an easy code way to be incorporated into something like Jcink, I don't like it because I forget discord exists 99% of the time, haha

 

[Ravenfreak]

I think shoutboxes and chatrooms on forums tend to take activity away from the main forum which is why I don't currently have one installed on my sites. They can work on specific forums such as roleplaying ones however.

 

[an0nym0us]

I think its not good idea for forums..

 

[~ True Legend ~]

Should forums have a chatroom? It does help connect members together, but it does lead to spam. What do you think?

Does discord count in this case?

 

[veloman]

Definitely agree with you there. The only time I see a chatroom/shoutbox work is for quick staff conversations on a super busy forum. Anything else, it draws away activity from the main forums and they end up with a bunch of spam anyway.

Using phpBB I often end up on other phpBB forums looking for stuff, and I've come across quite a few shoutboxes and by and large they're full of junk and as ugly as sin.

I feel like they're a bit redundant these days, and if people want to chat in real time there are plenty of options available - all backed up with a lot of money and huge development teams (Discord, Telegram, Messenger, etc.). A forum add on is never going to compete with them, so if you need live chat just integrate Discord!

I also think that forums are used for more long form discussions, as well as creating a (semi-) permanent record of what has been said and talked about. People can't use 10 year old chatbox messages to answer their questions, but they can follow a 10 year old thread that pops up on Google.

If people want a short form discussion they'll more then likely end up on Facebook groups where they can comment underneath posts. I don't want to try and compete with that!

 

[JennyorAlice]

If it's already active, I think it's okay. Until the forum itself gains the right amount of activity and can stay active, I would have a chatbox or anything like that on it.

 

[Reverie]

I think it's a cool feature for premium users perhaps. I wouldn't typically use it unless it was just a place for announcements and what not. Thinking back to a general forum - it can take activity away from the main forum. I think this feature if used only by staff to announce things could be helpful though!

 

[Tyrsson]

Only if you're on a PHP-only environment where you're having to call the server every few seconds, for every user. It's better now because you can do things like open one call-home no matter how many tabs you have open (something you never used to be able to do) but realistically anyone going to do this could spin up something on Node or similar.

Unlike PHP which is 'send a request, get a response, close the connection', Node can let you open the connection and leave it idle, and push content to it, so you can scale a chat much better, but is out of the league of smaller hosting.

Php Fibers and Websocket can do the same exact thing for all practical purposes.

Now, with that said. I've been thinking about this... For upcoming projects of my own... Is there any reason anyone can think of to prevent said subset of replies to the "chat" becoming a thread?

Say me and cedric are in a chat thread (of course this would not be through discord etc), it would be through the forum itself (its server) and it would use the same login, permissions, etc from the forum itself. So, since we have that information why could we not then allow the creation of a thread based on a section of that conversation.

So me and Cedric have a great idea during said conversation, or one of us just makes a great suggestion. That message(s) could be selectable. Since the chat is actually part of the domain model, it could have access to post that message to the "forum" for topic creation.

Think about this. Ya know how PM's or personal message are implemented here in XF. But what if when you clicked that "start conversation" button. It opened a smaller "window", sorta like how facebook does it and your "conversation" was in real time instead of how its just a private thread between two users? I mean that is really all it would be, it would just be relayed in real time

 

[Spartan]

Chat rooms really draw away from activity on forums in my experience with using them.

 

[Tyrsson]

Chat rooms really draw away from activity on forums in my experience with using them.

You missed my point. What Im thinking is not a "chatroom" but more like messenger. It's like "conversation" here, but instant. WIth XF you have the ability to add a person to the private thread, which would be useful for like staff meetings etc.

 

[Spartan]

You missed my point. What Im thinking is not a "chatroom" but more like messenger. It's like "conversation" here, but instant. WIth XF you have the ability to add a person to the private thread, which would be useful for like staff meetings etc.

I think it’d still draw activity away from forum as it’d be easier to IM other members then have open discussion on the forum