Why no chat rooms???

Chat rooms defeat the purpose of a forum.

 

My experience with them is they are fun at first but they quickly turn into a ghost town after a month or two. Something like a game forum they are handy for instant info. We use to have trivia contests on them in a different forum. But on a trucking forum they are kind of useless.

We would have five conversations going on at one time, not knowing who called who what and megabytes flying everywhere!

 

Not to mention, that 95% of the threads in this forum are full of very useful information.

A chat room would mostly be like chitchatting over coffee.

I think a chat room would be cool, but I'd probably take it over by bothering people and constantly asking to hear trucker stories But I guess that's the purpose of having dinner at the Iron Skillet.

OTR can be very lonely at times. Sometimes I would go and have dinner at the truckstop just to hear other people talk and BS with each other.

I think a chatroom might work if it were possible to moderate it constantly, and/or only allow privileged members (those with a certain amount of "thanked"s, or if they have 3 or 4 + stars.

 

I've thought about setting up an unofficial chat room somewhere. Tell you guys what, if the mods have no problem with it and enough of you bother me about it, I'll set one up. I've had experience in the past dealing with chats so I think I can keep it relatively upright. Everybody would have to have at least a basic working knowledge of IRC and know going in that things can get out of hand once in a while.

All the mods here would get mod powers there if they wanted it. Pretty sure I can find a bot script where people in chat could vote kick anyone who showed up just to annoy everyone too, for when all the mods are asleep. IRC bots are fun to play around with.

 

I too would like to see a chat room. IRC of whatever. If you need server admins, I have extensive experience in it. That is, if you ever do decide to open one. And, you really do not need any knowledge of IRC as a user, because there are many IRC Clients that they can connect to simply by typing in web addy and which connects them directly to the channel. These are easy to configure on the server end.

 

I do not like the bot script idea though. You can configure the IRCd to take care of most issues.