Boards needs a proper chatroom

Saskia

And none of this IRC nonsense, IRC looks and feels like the internet 10 years ago. How about a shiney new room using a good looking applet with all the bells and whistles. Whenever a member already signed into Boards goes there he/she is automatically signed in without fuss.

Thoughts?

koneko

The IRC channel was removed because it caused a lot of hassle (rather, 1 person caused a lot of hassle). I don't think a java/whatever chatroom would be any different.

No it doesnt need a chatroom.IRC is there.The official boards.ie IRC was closed down due to muppetry so I would doubt that they would consider a chatroom.

6th

Could be good but I think it would take away from the 'Discussion Forum' side of the site.

Not easy to Moderate either I'd say.

It could work for lets say AH but would it not just go crazy?

Saruman

Maybe someone could integrate a messenger like MSN etc into boards.
You could have a friends list on boards which syncs with a messenger program? Probably pretty hard to do though.

Saskia

6th wrote:

Could be good but I think it would take away from the 'Discussion Forum' side of the site.

The community feel on Boards is non existent, a chatroom with scheduled times for chats could help that. All there seems to be posts wise is a load of arrogance lately. There is so much potential for a chatroom.

Gordon

Sounds great. I nominate Saskia to implement/create and moderate this spangly new whistling applet.

aidan_walsh

There is so much potential for a chatroom.

Real time arrogance?

I'm not seeing what the difference would be from IRC, tbh. If you want to have private one-on-one messaging with people, use PMs or swap IM addresses.

You say you don't like the feel of IRC-like rooms, whats the alternative?

Saskia

aidan_walsh wrote:

You say you don't like the feel of IRC-like rooms, whats the alternative?

IRC looks like something the army used back in the 1970s. Horrible horible look and feel.

r3nu4l

Saskia wrote:

The community feel on Boards is non existent

I disagree. I think that boards.ie has a great community feel. Give it time, you'll grow to love it. A chatroom may add something to the site but would also take a lot away and as others have said, it would be extremely hard to moderate.

As for arrogance, surely you aren't suggesting that the majority of new posts each day are full of arrogance? There are loads of good posters out there.

Sure there's a few really arrogant people posting here and on occassion I've re-read some of my own posts and thought they sounded a bit high and mighty but I try not to be! A chatroom will not reduce arrogance and will only result in even more trolling/flaming and general muppetry.

EDIT: IRC may look and feel old but it still allows you to chat

jesus_thats_gre

Jesus still so many self righteous tards hanging about on boards I see - that good old community whereby someone relatively new posts a reasonable idea and depending on who posts a response first, all their bum chums descend on the thread to generally rubbish the idea.

The girl has a point in fairness. Chat rooms are pretty **** in general but give her a chance. Different strokes for different folks and all.

Terry

I don't see any self righteousness there.
All those answers have been clear and concise.

6th

Saskia wrote:

The community feel on Boards is non existent

You obviously have read as little on here as you have posted. Non existant community feel?

Have you seen how successful the recent Beers was? Have you seen how often the photography forum meet or the paranormal forum? Or the recent Darts forum meet up? ... thats just a few.

Overall the love is flowing on Boards.ie!

OP do you contribute much or does the lack of 'community feel' put you off?

WhiteWashMan

Saskia wrote:

And none of this IRC nonsense, IRC looks and feels like the internet 10 years ago. How about a shiney new room using a good looking applet with all the bells and whistles. Whenever a member already signed into Boards goes there he/she is automatically signed in without fuss.

Thoughts?

#boards is where most people who are interested in chatting hang out.

if you dont like the look and feel of IRC, then perhaps you should find a shiney new app that will allow you to give it the look and feel you want.

there is a community on boards.ie, perhaps you just arent aware of it yet?

and i do recall there was some sort of applet thingy that allowed people to chat here a while ago. i logged in once, and im sure Ruu was there. maybe he can shed some light on it?

although, i dont see what it would 'add' to the site in general, and as stated before, the boards.ie channel was shut down becuase of some spastic behaviour of a few people. i have no doubts that the same behaviour would come through again.

i am also not sure how much legality would be involved in 'boards.ie' chat room, and how much the admins would be responsible for. i can tell you know that if the answer is 'anything' then it wont happen!

my suggestion is to hang around in #boards if you want to meet and chat with boardsies. or go and meet them in person.

Crucifix

What's that program where you enter a URL and it creates a little chatroom for it? There was an obsession with it for about a day a while back, before it just turned into 30 people called rb_ie, but it worked fine, and could be just what the OP is looking for.

r3nu4l

jesus_thats_gre wrote:

Jesus still so many self righteous tards hanging about on boards I see - that good old community whereby someone relatively new posts a reasonable idea and depending on who posts a response first, all their bum chums descend on the thread to generally rubbish the idea.

The girl has a point in fairness. Chat rooms are pretty **** in general but give her a chance. Different strokes for different folks and all.

Wow, hope that wasn't directed at my post too (coz the world revolves around me and all:)). I thought my response was reasoned enough. I stated that a chatroom could add to boards, could take away from boards and be hard to moderate.

What's the problem there, am I not allowed an opinion?....Jesus, that's great! /laughs at own pun.

koneko

jesus_thats_gre, I hope your response wasn't directed at me either, if it was I suggest you take a nice big chill pill.

The IRC room was closed because of... well everyone knows why... I responded about that because I don't think the admins are going to be on for doing all that again. I thought the OP should know because she might not, and it's very relevant.

_blank_

6th wrote:

You obviously have read as little on here as you have posted. Non existant community feel?

Have you seen how successful the recent Beers was? Have you seen how often the photography forum meet or the paranormal forum? Or the recent Darts forum meet up? ... thats just a few.

Overall the love is flowing on Boards.ie!

OP do you contribute much or does the lack of 'community feel' put you off?

Don't forget the Soccer Team set up last August aswell.

Talliesin

Saskia wrote:

And none of this IRC nonsense, IRC looks and feels like the internet 10 years ago. How about a shiney new room using a good looking applet with all the bells and whistles.

Yes, IRC sucks compared to the multi-coloured lagfest available through applets (99% of them are just bad IRC clients anyway) .

It's going to have to be pretty good to take the existing community away from what they have, especially since many of them are also in channels (some based on boards forums, most not) on the same IRC network. I think you're going to have a hard time writing that.

popebenny16

forgive my ignorance but what is #boards and IRC? And, how do i access them?

as for chatrooms in general, advantage is instant disadvantage is that the admins could be liable for whats said there.

Wasn't it Rozie who had problems with the IRC thingy? That sounded nasty indeed.

cormie

We use an mod called FlashChat on our site. Our site is nowhere near as busy as boards and would be more a site where people go to get information than to chat so our room is really only used for organising things between members and the likes but it's still handy to have.

It works so that anyone who signs up to the site can enter using ONLY the account they signed up with, so if your saskia on the forum, your saskia in the chat room. If your IP is banned, you can't log in, and everything so it's pretty much as safe as the forum. It's pretty customisable, even the colours and layouts and what users are and aren't allowed do.

Here's some links for admins if they want to consider it:
http://tufat.com/docs/flashchat/index.html
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=120926

koneko

popbenny,

You use a program like mIRC to get onto IRC, you have to put in a server, on the server you'd find channels like #boards (the server in this case would be quakenet.org).

When Wiki is working again, you can read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

Dunno about Rozie, but that wasn't what I was referring to before, don't remember seeing anything about Rozie taking issue with the channel, but I could easily have missed that.

scojones

What IRC client are you using? At the end of the day Ted, it's text-based chat. Would you prefer something like MSN with nudges and annoying emoticons? Go on out of that!

IRC is grand ( It is however a very very very crap protocol, but that is another debate ). I'd prefer if we moved #boards to a SILC server I maintain, but it's hard enough to get people to auth, let alone use SILC! Plus, I like quakenet.

To summarise, boards doesn't need a proper chatroom. It has one. You just need to change your view.

Talliesin

popebenny16 wrote:

forgive my ignorance but what is #boards and IRC? And, how do i access them?

Internet Relay Chat is a chat protocol. It's been around a lot longer than this new-fangled World-Wide Web thingy.

You can get yourself a client for whatever operating system you want from the web.

#boards is a room that is run by some boardsies on the quakenet IRC network.

It is not officially associated with boards.ie and given the way the former officially associated channel went, it's not likely that there'll be an official one any time soon.

A lot of the private forums also have IRC channels, mostly also on quakenet.

Nevyn

There are programs that will make irc look shiney, trillian and xchat.
The content of a chat room can not be moderated as easily as the site and I certain under stand the legal quagmire it could be for the site admin to have it attched to the site.

There was a plug in once but the fact it was linked to the site ment that
many users could not acess it from work as all chat programs and site attcached from them are blacklisted for a lot of people at work.

www.gabbly.com can be used and was used for a while for posters who hung about certain sections of boards but it didn't last long.

scojones

cormie wrote:

We use an mod called FlashChat on our site. Our site is nowhere near as busy as boards and would be more a site where people go to get information than to chat so our room is really only used for organising things between members and the likes but it's still handy to have.

It works so that anyone who signs up to the site can enter using ONLY the account they signed up with, so if your saskia on the forum, your saskia in the chat room. If your IP is banned, you can't log in, and everything so it's pretty much as safe as the forum. It's pretty customisable, even the colours and layouts and what users are and aren't allowed do.

Here's some links for admins if they want to consider it:
http://tufat.com/docs/flashchat/index.html
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=120926

The irony of this is that chat is using the IRC protocol.

DublinWriter

r3nu4l wrote:

A chatroom may add something to the site but would also take a lot away and as others have said, it would be extremely hard to moderate.

Thus spaketh r3nu4l. If you can't moderate it, it's not worth doing.

There are plenty of chat places were people who use boards congregate, including Yahoo, Lycos (UK) and various private and public IRC channels.

There are others. Google around.

r3nu4l

DublinWriter wrote:

Thus spaketh r3nu4l. If you can't moderate it, it's not worth doing.

Mis-representing what a poster has written? Hardly surprising coming from DublinWriter, it's a speciality

Commedation:
"Look at me putting words in other peoples mouths" ribbon, first class: Dublin Writer :rolleyes:

DublinWriter

r3nu4l wrote:

Mis-representing what a poster has written? Hardly surprising coming from DublinWriter, it's a speciality

Really? Maybe you'll cite other examples then, if you claim it's my 'specialty'?

If you want to defame me, I'd like to see some evidence first.

r3nu4l

DublinWriter wrote:

Really? Maybe you'll cite other examples then, if you claim it's my 'specialty'?

You know, I'm not even going to bother mate, if you want to deny that's what you were doing with my post that's fine Your response to my original post was evidence enough for me, it was expertly done, well done you, the ribbon I awarded you was well deserved. Add it to your sig, you know you want to :rolleyes:

/bats handbag at DW

Ruu_Old

WWM, yeah there was a chat applet thingy, found it again. I don't know if anyone uses it anymore.Main site here or to chat with the lovely folks at After Hours for example, use

gabbly.com/www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=7

Talliesin

DublinWriter wrote:

If you want to defame me, I'd like to see some evidence first.

DublinWriter banned for defamation.

Defamation includes unfairly accusing someone else of defamation.

Sparky

Gawd another badge.

Goodshape

cormie wrote:

It works so that anyone who signs up to the site can enter using ONLY the account they signed up with, so if your saskia on the forum, your saskia in the chat room. If your IP is banned, you can't log in

Woops! That looks like it might actually be a constructive post, cormie. You must be new to Feedback?

I think something like that could be good though. With access limited to registered and signed-in Boards.ie users, surely that would curtail most of the mayhem?

Could be subscriber-only if you want to be extra careful.

And I'd say a chat page integrated into the site would look, feel and work better than needing to download an IRC client and connect to QuakeNet.

Worth considering, I say.

plonk

How about make it like the soccer forum and to gain access you need 1000 posts and you posts to be reviewed so that u cant spam ur way to 1000 (or is 1000 unrealistic)

cormie

1,000 is far too many. I'd even think 100 would be too many.

plonk

Im not too sure it doesnt take too long to build up 100 posts(unless your on dial-up). I would say there is a good 3000 members of boards with 500+posts So make it 500, but the question is would it be worthwhile for cloud and the crew



EDIT: Just look at this post only 3 people with less than a 1000 me the op and pope

Shiminay

Does boards.ie need a chatroom? Absolutely not. There is the facility to add your Messenger/Yahoo/ICQ/whatever's flavour of the month details to your profile if you want people to talk to. Boards is all about community (we just had the #boards beers for the IRC channel users the other night, 40 odd attendees), find a board that's relevant to your interests (cue that cat picture) and join in. You'll get to know the people there and where they hang out online (be it IRC or a messenger thing).

It's really not even worth entertaining any further discussion about moderating it based on post count or anything like that, it can't be moderated and remain a chatroom in the real sense of the word. If boards sticks a link up for an applet to join an IRC channel (which they used to do before) and a minor wanders in only to click a link that resulted in their needing psychotherapy, boards could be held accountable.

In short, I think it's a nice idea, but un-necessary and not realistically possible.

Saskia

cormie wrote:

It works so that anyone who signs up to the site can enter using ONLY the account they signed up with, so if your saskia on the forum, your saskia in the chat room. If your IP is banned, you can't log in, and everything so it's pretty much as safe as the forum. It's pretty customisable, even the colours and layouts and what users are and aren't allowed do.

Thats what we should try. If you're logged in as Cormie or Goodshape or Saskia or whatever they you have to automatically be logged into the chatroom as the same. If you act the fool they give you get a warning, do it again and your username is site banned from both Boards and the room.

jesus_thats_gre

Goodshape wrote:

Woops! That looks like it might actually be a constructive post, cormie. You must be new to Feedback?

I think something like that could be good though. With access limited to registered and signed-in Boards.ie users, surely that would curtail most of the mayhem?

Could be subscriber-only if you want to be extra careful.

And I'd say a chat page integrated into the site would look, feel and work better than needing to download an IRC client and connect to QuakeNet.

Worth considering, I say.

If it was tied into your boards.ie user account it would limit alot of crap alright. While there alot of work from moderators required to keep boards ticking over, alot of this effort is put into giving eijits a clip around the ear and most of it is fairly harmless. The same would probably transfer to a chat room and any major misbehaving would be quickly pointed out by someone or spotted by a moderator.

DeVore

We turned away from IRC simply because the admins were not personally happy to stand over the abuse and offensiveness that was going on and which was being linked to our site. Trojans, goat.se, abuse and conflict was far outweighing any benefit and it was a nightmare to manage.

Its possible that there are alternatives and management tools that might allieviate these problems but to be honest, I cant fault what Kharn said.
I dont see it as a community building tool per se and its not post moderatable realistically.

DeV.

The Sweeper

But Tom, if boards.ie hasn't got a chatroom, where are the newbies of today going to have their cybersex, eh?

WhiteWashMan

they should go to a boards beer, and i will have sex with them...

Beruthiel

Don't forgot to wash your cock first

popebenny16

Is it time for the cats yet?

Saskia

Minesajackdaniels wrote:

But Tom, if boards.ie hasn't got a chatroom, where are the newbies of today going to have their cybersex, eh?

they should go to a boards beer, and i will have sex with them...

Don't forgot to wash your cock first

Ah yes, here comes the Boards Brotherhood. Anytime a suggestion comes up in Feedback it seems to be those zany mods going off topic. If the last 2 comments had been made by anyone else there would be bannings. Double standards?

cormie

I never used the chat room when it was here for "chat", but it was handy if you needed a quick answer to a question you had. I don't thinkt it would take away from the community aspect at all as the people who go to it generally just go for a chat. I think you'd still have the same volume of questions, answers and discussion on the site.

Maybe check out the options on that flashchat anyway and see if it suits:)

6th

All of them are just posters on this forum .... not mods.

Anyway the question was answered by DeV so now this thread is a free-for-all.

So have you gotten involved in the Community Spirit of Boards yet Saskia? Will we be seeing you at a Beers?

6th

Use Gabbly if you want to chat.

r3nu4l

Saskia wrote:

Ah yes, here comes the Boards Brotherhood. Anytime a suggestion comes up in Feedback it seems to be those zany mods going off topic. If the last 2 comments had been made by anyone else there would be bannings. Double standards?

Actually the Admin DeVore (who has replied to your thread reasonably) recently criticised the fact that too many threads are being spoiled by off-topic answers etc.

However I believe that you've had a lot of decent responses to this thead including an Admin response. Basically the response seems to be that in principle it's not a bad idea but it's too difficult to operate and has the potential to cause legal hardship for the site.

If you as the OP can find or suggest a way around this problem then the Admins will probably take a very serious look at your suggestion. It's up to you (or another user with a good idea) now Saskia. The thread appears to have run it's natural course with nothing new added so of course the banter will start (rightly or wrongly)

Crucifix

Saskia wrote:

Ah yes, here comes the Boards Brotherhood.

And you said there was no community feel