Chat rooms - what did they do to your community?

[LanciaStratos]

Some of my members really want me to implement a chat room at my site, integrated with my forums. But, I'm not sure about what kind of effects it could have on the community. Would it hurt my forum activities? Would people post fewer messages? Or, would it bring my members closer together - encouraging them to talk with each other more (on the forums)?

[Martz]

Our chat rooms (irc) and forums seem to buzz off each other. At the moment its the busiest its every been for us, and one of our funniest threads is the IRC quote hall of fame :)

IMO it brings people togehter so they can chat casually, people want they voices to be heard forever on some things, so that many people can read them. They go to the forums and do this. Many people sit on IRC and chat whilst posting. Keeps them in your community, and at your site for longer. I haven't attempted to do this, its just the way its happened.

IRC for us is like a social gathering outside of UT, but other channels supplement it. The UT matches are reportered to channels which is like people viewing a football match scorelines in some respects, but people can talk and see live events.

Get some sort of interaction and you'll be on a winner.

[Nafae]

Do you know how to get a 'irc shell' for your domain if your host doesn't provide it? If you registered your domain through your host, IE my site coderforums.net, is it possible to go around and register irc.coderforums.net or whatever even if the irc server is completly away from my host's location?

Just curious :)

[Freddie Bingham]

I find that the chatrooms actually create more posting because the users stick around the site longer. They have chat in one window, while refreshing another window with the forums.

[Tony]

What are we using for a chat room?

[Martz]

Originally posted by Nafae
Do you know how to get a 'irc shell' for your domain if your host doesn't provide it? If you registered your domain through your host, IE my site coderforums.net, is it possible to go around and register irc.coderforums.net or whatever even if the irc server is completly away from my host's location?

Just curious :)

Of course you can, thats the idea of subdomains :) If you have a server seperate from your vB/web server and has a different IP - get your hosts to create an A record for irc.yourdomain.com and point it to your ircd shell.

[Joe Gronlund]

i have one , i just schedule chat times for all board members to meet and talk. :cool:

[klisis]

That's a good idea.

Originally posted by Asendin
i have one , i just schedule chat times for all board members to meet and talk. :cool:

[ubbuser]

Chat rooms are great if they weren't that frigging expensive

Digichat is great. But so expensive. Same with Volano chat.

NOt much competition going on since most companies have left it to MSN, Yahoo and AOL mainly.