Give us a chatbox.

I never understood the point of a shoutbox.
Either nobody uses it, or it turns into a chat with borderline idiotic functionality.

So i suggest: replace the shout- with a chatbox!

- better usage
- people use it as a chat anyways
- one could see users online
- you can have a proper discussion
- also kittens

Please?

http://i.imgur.com/WVnjtRDl.jpg

More kittens please

If you're in need for kittens:
https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens

The "idea" was more or less serious though.

I never understood the point of a shoutbox.
Either nobody uses it, or it turns into a chat with borderline idiotic functionality.

So i suggest: replace the shout- with a chatbox!

- better usage
- people use it as a chat anyways
- one could see users online
- you can have a proper discussion
- also kittens

Please?

People do use the shoutbox.

Personally I do not see the need for a chatroom, I think it would a lot of extra work for the moderators for very little, if any gain.

tbh can't you already use the shoutbox for most of that. i have to ask myself do I really want to moderate an equivalent of the GR chatroom in coh1?

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That is the question. I often see people starting conversations there, which is obviously not the best thing due it's size and functionality.

What about resizing the current shoutbox, or an option to do so?
It could become a quick and easy way to communicate, besides the forums.
(Edit: you could be right though, it might end up in too much spam)

edit/rewrite: i was gonna saying somthing in more detail but to put simply i still am hung up onhorrid nightmares of GR chat.

basically its 10x more work for moderators and it would have to be constantly moderated or become a cespit which isn't ideal. unless we have a bunch of moderators with nothing to do i don't think its practical. almost forgot what i was gonna add to this post orignally. one more factor people would have to use it, coh2.org has a mumble it is not heavily used yes i could see why this might be used more but at the same time probably less because its nto nearly as convient as a shoutbox which is why people use it.

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Am i doing it right?

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Am i doing it right?

yes, yes you are.

The shoutbox is ok but it really needs a timer. Maybe 1 hour.
Every day at the moment I log on and more than half the shouts are from 1 person.
As an added bonus only the most incredibly patient people could have an argument on a 1-hour timer.

Oh wow. GR chatroom was epic troll convention.

You have plenty of services for live chat, like Steam. We considered making the shoutbox push shouts (Seb even wrote the code) but we decided not to implement it for fear of it becoming spammy and more flamey than it already is. We like our shoutbox, it is almost exactly the same as it was back on hicksi's original fulltimegeeks COH1 livestream list site, which is where this all began.

APF: We got plenty of chats, but sadly not a single decent one and the shoutbox often just ends up as a chat anyways.

So far, feel free to close this thread. WiFiDi pretty much summed it up perfectly. Was just an idea.

Shoutbox auto-scrolling now?
One step closer to a chatbox <evil laughter>

totally not a necro or double post here.

The shoutbox is not like a live chat because it keeps the history of previous messages, and this won't change anytime soon.

How would you feel about a new dedicated page on the site (and not on the right column) with a typical live chat with no history but a user list?

Is that what you request? This would be surprisingly easy to do if we decided to. The "main issue" is not technical, but moderation.

Well, a simple site internal settings menu might be nice. For refresh time, size, etc.
And no, i really don't want anything new, just more features.

You don't need to refresh anymore, it's already pushed in real time! (since this week, just a bit after adding the scroll)
For the size you can do it by applying custom CSS with a browser add-on (depending on which one you have). We don't increase it ourselves because we believe what is below the shoutbox on the column is relevant as well.


But the main point is that we don't want people to use the shoutbox like a chat. The current use is about perfect, we would have to change it drastically if people actually used it more.

And if that had to happen, I like one of the above suggestions of limiting the number of shout per time and per user. It already has a timer actually to prevent flood! But it's only 15 or 30 second. And probably not for staff. I don't exactly remember.


Ideally we don't want conversions in there, just individual shouts, a bit like a twitter feed now that I think about it. That said we are usually lenient about conversions if they are relevant enough.


But if there is more need for the community to talk about stuff that neither the forums nor the shoutbox can fulfil, we'd be more than happy to create new options.

I'm currently strongly considering adding a basic chat as I described on the previous post just to see its impact and what we could learn from it.

...
For the size you can do it by applying custom CSS with a browser add-on (depending on which one you have)...

Ideally we don't want conversions in there, just individual shouts...a bit like a twitter feed now ...

Yup, just asking for an internal way of doing things.

I think we passed that point long time ago, which is a good thing in my opinion. It grants the option to do a quick chat, while not ending up in the usual spam. Anyways, not asking for a complete rework, just a slight feature add-on. Auto-refresh already happened, so there's that.