Do you have a chat room on your forum?

[Deleted member 49125]

Why or why not? I don’t for mine as I personally don’t care for in real time talking. I need time to think lol For those who do have one, is it quite popular? Do you have set times for chatting?

 

[Gh0st4unt3r]

I dont have a chatroom on my site i think it will take away from the forums and talks from from other areas of the site. but i see on some sites people do use them and works well depending on the niche of the site.

 

[Page]

Nope, I never had a chatroom on my IPB site. While on SMF, I had a chatroom for a while and then removed it. It wasn't that great and end of the day it was taken up half of the page and I want members to view the boards.

The only positive about chatboxes is that when there's a new reply or topic being posted, you can get a bot feed being posted in the chatbox with regards to new replies or topics.

 

[Fait]

I use discord for the chat side of things, but I’ve made it limited because I prefer people to use the forums.

 

[tahssa]

I think the chatroom makes the form get less post cos people use thje chatbox

 

[Nomad]

I don't have a chat room on my forums and I do not see a point in why should I allow members to chat. I think all forum discussion should be within the forum not on chatrooms.

 

[Shortie_]

I used to have way back when I first started out with forums and a chat room on my forum but I found that it got used more than the forums itself and the forums saw very little activity. I chose to remove the chat room feature due to that and that saw an increase in activity on the forums I never went back to having a chat room on my forum again after that.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I have had them in the past and they take away from the forum, IMO.

It's easier to chat about something than to post a thread or reply.

To be fair though, it's also easier to LIKE a post than to reply but the reaction buttons are too popular to get rid of.

I stay away from a chat room in order to keep the forum active.

Chat tends to eat a lot more server resources, too.

 

[Jay™]

I have had them in the past however I found integrating discord posting into the forums worked nice.

 

[Deleted member 57615]

I have had them in the past and they take away from the forum, IMO.

It's easier to chat about something than to post a thread or reply.

To be fair though, it's also easier to LIKE a post than to reply but the reaction buttons are too popular to get rid of.

I stay away from a chat room in order to keep the forum active.

Chat tends to eat a lot more server resources, too.

Agreed. Sometimes a like button takes away replies, but in many cases there isn't much value to add. I would love to see a separate statistic for the amount of likes/reactions on a forum in the forum statistics. I think that would be interesting to see.

Make it happen @Ozzy47 😛

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Agreed. Sometimes a like button takes away replies, but in many cases there isn't much value to add. I would love to see a separate statistic for the amount of likes/reactions on a forum in the forum statistics. I think that would be interesting to see.

Make it happen @Ozzy47 😛

If anyone can do it, it's the OZMAN!!!

 

[Jay™]

I think he has an addon for this along with the other 500, I will have a look.

 

[Uncrowned Guard]

I feel that chats are great IF there is a reason for that chat. A gaming forum that has a Discord server can benefit from allowing the two communities to talk to each other as the forum may have the core of their site, but Discord has voice chat for gaming. You need to make sure that you are not fighting your own structure with two sources of interaction for your members.

Generally, I do not see forums that simply add a "chat room" as very beneficial for the community as a whole. For myself, I use a chat feature for our live stream section as using forums to chat during a live stream is not a great route, but that chat is small and not very intrusive into the main community.

However, there are plenty of ways to make it work. Community char nights to build bonds, events, and some many more creative ways to use the two interchangeably exist.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Back in the day I had a shoutbox on my old Sonic community. It rarely got used though, so now I never really bother with adding a chat room to any of my forums. I suppose the closest thing I've got now is the built in groups system via vBulletin but that's it really.

 

[Cory]

I don't use a chatroom/shoutbox, but I do have a Discord server. The Discord server mainly acts as a way to keep members informed on the latest resources released, but we also have some other handy channels members can use.

 

[Page]

Discord is far better option then chat room nowdays

 

[Jay™]

I've gotten rid of all chat rooms and addons I had on sites, and I've come to like Slack and what it can do.
I may even upgrade to pro.

 

[PGen98]

I have a chat on my forum, but that's because of the nature of the forum itself. I don't really like them on most other forums. I do agree that Slack is proving to be a more competent platform overall, Discord is ok, but Slack is quite nice.

 

[Deleted member 1609]

I don't think that having a chat room is a bad thing, but I always preferred to have a Discord server for my community as well as a forum. It's more feature-rich and exciting than a chat functionality on a forum in my opinion.