How about a PN chat room?

There used to be a photo.net chat room at one time. Maybe it is time to

resurrect the idea.

 

With the demise of subscriptions/donations, the chat room could be a 'pay for'

option.

 

A flat annual fee would at least keep passing trouble makers out because they

can cause trouble totally for free in lots of other places. The money could help

PN revenue (and fund some moderation). Entry also only for registered PN members

of course.

 

Also this may serve the purpose of keeping 'chat' from the forums and lighten

the load on forum moderators/archive space etc.

Alternative view - leave it alone and let it evolve naturally as it has done ?

I agree with Bill, on topic forums with a little chat seem more pleasant to me than the alternative segregation and resulting new forum. I think photo.net is trying to condense rather than expand on forums. So, it would make sense to combine the chat room principle in the existing format, within reason.

 

Cheers.

It works very effectively elsewhere. The amateurphotographer.com forums, which are quite sizeable, use this method effectively.

http://philip.greenspun.com/doc/chat is the software that we wrote for this (see the bottom for an actual transcript from the launch). It still exists, but with modern browsers one could do much better on the user interface side. We ran the chat server for awhile and it was reasonably popular. Then we switched to AOL Instant Messenger, just linking to a chat room named "photonet". We thought it would be better since the AIM client is a native Windows application and runs faster, but it turned out not to work because "Joe Smith" at photo.net was "nikonguy456" on AIM and nobody could recognize each other.

Phil,

 

I don't think people want a live instant chat service, just a forum area that is purely for chat/socialising - it does seem like an easy way to divorce some of that from the other areas.

What if we renamed "General (Not Archived)" to "Casual Conversations"? Would that do the job?

Probably, but there may be some use to a form area being archived - but not necessarily indexed by google - we can always refer to bookmarks/linked threads that way.

Another forum I visit calls the "casual conversation" forum - "The Hideout". It is very active and popular. It seems to build a nice sense of community. Topics from what do you think of Honda's to Did you see Grey's Antatomy to Word Association games to dealing with kids, husbands, boyfriends etc. Sometimes there are posts about weddings too that are general and not necissarily for learning. No politics and no religion is every discussed - I don't know if it is a rule but you never see it. A catchy name might be nice - like "Sideboard" or "The Locker room" or "The Cubby Hole" maybe "The Peg Board" -- I don't know - Ideas anyone?

I think Trevor has a great idea. Other forums I use have this and it's handy for quickly communicating. But so are private messages...something else PN doesn't have. I use gmail as well specifically for real time chat when working on projects and with family/friends. Having a separate forum is different to the chat concept but it still should be implemented as well, imo.