Here's where we stand with this:
1. It's easy to turn the chat feature back on like we had it.
2. We could also do it on a schedule, like if everybody wanted to chat every Thursday night or something, or if a group of us wanted to have a special online event.
3. Putting it on this time confirmed what we experienced last year when we had it up: that new users would go there first, post technical questions, and then have a bad opinion of the whole forum, even though they would have experienced great feedback from the community if they had just posted to the regular forum boards.
4. The software that runs the whole forum (see mwForum.org) doesn't have a good chat module (as you have seen) and there is no way we can make it do what it really needs (show if there's anybody in the room). We can wait until an improved version is released. (Remember when we didn't have the ability to post pictures? The software does improve over time.)
5. We could change the whole forum software to something that has a better chat function, but half the people wouldn't like it, we'd have login problems, and we would lose the history of more than 70,000 posts that helps make the forum so great.
6. We could add a separate chat server independent of the forum. That might require a separate password (although we might be able to get it to share the user database), but it would dilute and weaken the original forum audience ultimately, I bet.
7. We could use an outside service like Google Chat or AIM that has ads on it.
Comments?
Ross
AWS Marketing
Jeff, Maybe you should have showered and put on a little deodorant :-)
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