this still applies :



It should be noted that the old chat that helped killed the WotC servers had hours that it wasn't open

So the issue with chat is that you have no paper trail OR it might as well be a thread?

I can start my idea off in a thread, but if we end up getting a lot of people, doing it in a thread will be completely impractical and impossible.

Frankly, before getting some new project going,i'd rather get a front page

^^ What the dancing penguin said.

This isn't really a project.

i'd still like a front page before anything else gets added to the "to do " list

Yeah but miss bun is not here and the mods don't work on the front page that much so they might as well make everything else amazing until they get the front page passed down to them.

the front page isn't that big a deal unless you have things you want to put on it. right now there's not really any use for one because we don't have content to put there, so why make a big deal about it?

embedded chats are stupid when you have threads with no topic that people just talk in

they don't serve any purpose other than to divert traffic from the forums

If you have an irc, if you want to make it "official" its much harder to moderate because you need moderators on all the time (which is difficult to do) or issues become "he said she said" and you can't effectively moderate

in short, there is no point

i would have thought that YMTC would have content, when we first started talking about getting a front page,we had several ideas for content from articles to stuff posted in the forums. So we have content, it's just a matter of the staff having a meeting and saying "I'll step up and do this since the boss isn't here"

And honestly since everything else is done on a as needed basis, show that there's a need for the chat room by making a thread and going from there.

EDIT: In fact here's the discussion viewtopic.php?f=13&t=623&hilit=front+page

we don't have content, we have ideas for content. do we have anyone who's committed to actually creating things for the front page if it exists? if not, that's probably the first place to start. Pro Tour: YMTC will be starting soon, and when it does we could maybe do a coverage series, but that's not gonna magically happen, someone would have to write it. Lily's already expressed an interest in using an IRC chat for structured purposes. while I'm not in favor of the idea for moderation reasons, that's still more actual committed use than the front page has.

if you wade into the 7 pages of discussion, you'll see that a number of folks have stepped up and said they would write something for the front page,once it's made. Then there's the other stuff that folks have asked for ranging from a Gather for YTMC, to who knows what else.

Honestly at this point with the site approaching the 1 year mark,we really should have a front page.

They're actually working on the ymtc gatherer though, and that will have an immediate use.

The point of naming that is,that it's a project that is being worked on and so a chat room shouldn't draw away from that. A chat room is something for down the line, I currently do not see a need,just because you say there's a need.

At the start of this crazy fun house, a chat room was discussed but was dropped for a number of reason ranging from moderation issues to, let's focus on getting the forums and a front page and the wiki up and running.

I didn't say I needed a chat room now, just in the future. And this really didn't need any discussion because it's just a request thread.

Um... actually that's part of the reason it's a thread and not "just pm the admins". So that users who like the old feature and don't want the new feature can speak out against it.

Or that's at least my best guess.



The entire problem with a chat, in a nutshell, is that there are not enough people to police it and 24/7 modding is ..... interesting at best and impossible to do at worst. Especially with how often there is literally only one GOBO on at all (or none; none is less than one), and they are most likely doing something else important.... And without that there would have to be a paper trail. And at that point it might as well just be a link to the off topic thread in the off topic room. Or the off topic thread in DOTP. Whichever floats your boat.

There's also the issue of participants in IRCs needing to sync up -- to be on at the same time. Part of the reason this forum works on a base level is because there are people from all across the world posting. Just from my own list of friends from here, I know people in my home state of Texas in the U.S.A., people from the East Coast to the West Coast, Canada, Belgium, Denmark or Finland (I'm sorry I can't remember precisely which country); and that's not going into others whom I know live in other countries but whom I'm not that familiar with -- like Chinkeeyong from Singapore. If you want to organize something via IRC, you are going to be excluding people who can't be on at the same time you are.

And even that is ignoring the very simple fact that people can easily be on at the same time you are, see you post in a thread they were active in, read the post, and decide not to say anything. What makes you so sure they would if there was an IRC?

I personally don't mind if we have an IRC chatbox. It encourages users who don't normally interact with each other to say hi, and could tie the DOTP community closer to the rest of the forum. It's also nice for just chatting and makes NGA plain more fun to visit.

Is there a risk of moderation issues? Perhaps, but looking at the community we have right now, I think all of us are mature enough not to stir up trouble on the chatbox. (Except maybe LilyStorm spamming, but we can easily have safeguards for posting rapidly.) I think the pros outweigh the cons. If it does become a problem, we can just remove it again, no harm, no foul.

There are worse spammers than me, at least I actually say something most of the time.