I’m thinking, Bitcointalk forum has no chat box, Nxt forum has no chat box, but Peercoin forum has chat box. Why not post and chat in the forum thread so as to get more thread reading and repost? A long and hundred and thousands pages thread will definitely attract more users into the forum. The public talk and chat should be in the forum thread and it can be saved for others reading and reference. It’s also searchable. There is PM for private chat and communication. I even don’t know how to searh the chat history though I remember that it seems there is a chat history post link. The present chat box seems to hinder the user to learn and catch up what’s going on when the users are offline.
So I suggest to disable/remove chat box in the home page.
I see your point, but the chat serves a purpose for me to increase my feeling of actually connecting to other people in the community.
When I chat I write thing I wouldn’t write in a post, because its less of a hassle and less spammy (like, check out this reddit link). I add value which I wouldn’t add if there was no chat.
My bet is that if we remove the chat from the forum, those conversations would instead occur in IRC, which is one step further away from the forum
Fix proposal
Why not log the chat in the chat box and create a sub-forum where the logs are logged in a thread like fashion. One new thread for each day.
That way the chat would be searchable (and also possible to exclude by filtering when searching the forum I needed).
I second pillow’s fix proposal!
More than once I asked fuzzy for a log of the chat because I feared that important information might get lost. Each time I was happy to see fuzzy post the chat at some place (last time he even created a subdomain to access the chatbox log!), but I’d like it very much to have the chat logged automatically in the forum.
Being able to dig into that would be great.
One might say that things are posted in the chat, which shouldn’t be logged. But I think those things would better be put into a PM anyway…
It’s great to put the chat box in a dedicated subforum if it is necessary. So it’s convenient for you to chat and communicate. On the other hand, I think the public chat should be logged, and as you suggested logged automatically in the thread fashion.
BTW, could Fuzzy provide the data/statistics how many users spoken in the chat? I think it’s not so many and the chat box is generally used by those core members in the forum. So if the chat can’t be logged or not suitable to public, I think IRC talk, skype, google hangout(http://nxtfoundation.com/updates/) or PM are ok.
We need to think out of ourselves, the public forum is for general users and it’s also a promotion place. The developpers/core members/organizers communication is more like group internal affairs, if it’s not private, it should be public and let all the potential interested users to catch up and know about the community progress, and if it is private I think it’s not a good place to communicate in such a way in the forum chat box. At the same time, we can be enhanced by the community collective wisdom through the public chat/talk/post.
Bitcointalk is a great place to get publicity for a new growing community especially at the early stage. As seen the Nxt community is a great case study. Nxt community was always in BTT https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345619.0 for about 5 months with more than 2600 pages thread and get the community stronger and stronger, and then moved to a community built forum. There are so many chats/talk and even trolls and memes in the main thread, it’s good for the community building at the early stage. For those new users coming, it’s also the first thread need to read to get the community background and progress. However, Peercoin forum doesn’t have such a thread apart from very professional questions and announcements. We need such a “chat” thread to update the community progress and general questions and answers for the users who doesn’t know where it should put in. Even in a big community forum, Nxt community also keeps the original BTT main thread and going on at https://nxtforum.org/general-discussion/nxt-pub-thread-2500-pages-on-nxtforum-org-or-bust/ .
If there was like a main thread on bitcointalk, in which peercoiners posted, then that thread would be bumped from time to time and yes, the number of pages does matter - because that’s one way for someone that is totally new to Peercoin to see that there is an active community (we already know that, but if you’ve never heard of Peercoin, then how would you?).
One thing that made me want to learn more about Peercoin, was that the community seemed to be well-balanced and put effort into writing quality posts. I hope this doesn’t change, but I don’t see anything wrong about consolidating some of the chatter either.
Take river333 weekly wrap-up; he’s doing an excellent job there, so why not cross-post that to bitcointalk and have a thread there which is called “[Peercoin] Newcomer Q&A and Weekly-wrap-up” or something like that. Perhaps people new to Peercoin, could get a good starting-point there.
I would rather we keep the chat box, as it has a certain vibe which you do not get in forums. It is relaxed and spontaneous
That said, I am not sure the chat box should be the first thing people should see - perhaps it could go at the bottom of the page, rather than the top, as somethings the chat is a bit irrelevant (football, computer games, politics!)
Why should chat be searchable? Chat by definition is ephemera. Sure, someone may want to search chat, but why should that override the writer’s choice not to record their words in a searchable thread? If we miss something, we miss it - that is the meaning of chat
So long as a log is kept, which can be accessed by a moderator if necessary, I like the current box - but question whether it should be at the top of the front page.
There are often topics discussed in the chat which are for sure not ephemerae.
And just because the forum itself doesn’t record the chat that doesn’t mean no one else does. There is no writers choice not to (have) record(ed) their words entered in the chat box (although there might be the illusion of it).
So why not record the content of the chat box in a thread?
I like the chatbox too, and it is something unique to crypto forums.
But maybe swap around with latest 10 posts at the bottom. Or a list with the most active threads or something like that. Might be more relevant for the average forum user.
Or as a sidebox as in btc-e.com
I was planning on setting some anchor tags in it to allow users to jump to specific interviews with Sunny as this was one of the main reasons I brought in the chat box as it allowed us to speak directly to Sunny King through the TOR network.
I thought the placement at top was best to show users what is the latest things people are talking about, usually i will link some articles or posts in there just for what is on the days agenda. Though I can move it to be less prominant on the forum if the community desires it to be elsewhere.
The chat box history page yes ideally this would be a page that updated automatically from the DB, but initially i decided to make the page a static page as easy enough to update myself manually and puts less demand on the mysql Db being called for all the chatbox history.
The history page was something i quicklly threw up for the benefit of getting all the info out there, it is a work in progress that needs to be updated and tweaked to make nice and user friendly.
Fuzzybear
side note I really want to sort out the https links not being click links as opposed to the http links which are on the chatbox so I am looking into this as well
there was a request to allow guests and new users to see the chat box as I had hidden it back in the day to stop spammy users or trolls getting any ideas, but with the interviews it seemed right to allow guests to see the chatbox without registering, maybe I could limit the chatbox to only users who have signed up to the forum?
My initial thoughts on adding the chat box was to give new users a place to ask questions and connect to peercoiners in real time, can be lonely at times!!
Almost any decent destination for cryptocurrency sites has some sort of chat box these days.
exchanges have a chatbox
mining pools have a chat box
It only makes sense for a forum to have a chatbox too. With regard to chat history, if Fuzzy didn’t create one, then some user would come along and make their own variation. This is what happened on btc-e’s chat.
I agree, it’s annoying to realize that a comment you’d make in chat is going to be archived and reviewed for ever and ever. But that is the nature of the web in general. Let’s say there was no chat history. But the user you were talking to manually copy/pasted the chat and re-posted it in a forum. Same problem. What comes out of your mouth in public is some thing you should stand behind anyway.
So I’m in agreement with the chatbox and with the chat history (reluctantly).
However, unless you are a registered user and logged in, you should NOT have access to the chat. In it’s place it should say some thing like:
“Chatbox is disabled until you login”
This has these benefits:
a) It encourages users to sign up. It also lets them gain the benefit of having post notifications by email sent to them
b) It encourages them to actually participate in the forums and chat by having an account to even see the chat
c) It stops Googlebot from indexing the chat without logging in… (While we are on this topic, Fuzzybear, please add NOINDEX meta tags and to the robots.txt for your chat history page. Do not let Google archive that stuff. It should be manually searchable and not something that comes up in general google search results). I also think the chat history should be hidden from view without a valid login to the forum.
d) By people logging in, we get to see who the last logged in users were. This shows how busy the forums are, and when the last time some one logged in on their profile.
These are only my views. If some one else agrees or dis agrees, please share.
I agree with PPCMan’s suggestion that the chat should be viewable by all, but that participation should be limited to those that sign up to the Forum. This will hopefully maintain the high quality of the comments/posts
More specifically, my suggestion was “unless you are a registered user and logged in, you should NOT have access to the chat”
So, no, viewing by all would not be allowed unless you logged in. Guests would only see that there is a chat feature they cannot see unless they become an active logged in member.
Not really. It isn’t the chatbox stopping the majority of the discussions. It’s a common thing to have people “lurk” around the forums reading the conversations, but not actually want to participate in them.
I prefer the regular forum for certain things, and I prefer the chat for certain things. Spur of the moment conversations work better in chat than in a forum. You’d lose this if you turn off chat. To prove this, look at the chat history, and read the forums and make a comparison. There is plenty of items talked about in chat that would never make it to the forum.
It’s not that the chat is stealing forum-posting worthy information. It’s the opposite. It’s supplementing it. Quite often in chat some one will say:
“Yeah, I agree. You should make a forum post about it, and I’ll reply”
Or you’ll also see in chat:
“Hey! Did you see this forum thread? You should read it. http://”
I use chat, and the forums. I never find myself combing through blocks of chat records. The information in them is often time sensitive and has little value days later, so there is no reason to do it.
The only thing a chat history helps me with, is if some one claims they didn’t say some thing in chat, and I can refer back and say “uhh, yeah, you did”.
That’s unfortunate. By this analogy, twitter shouldn’t exist, because, well, we have Facebook and that’s good enough. Or a website shouldn’t exist, because, well, we have bitcointalk / forums.
Social interaction comes in a variety of forms. You may admire forum posts as the most valuable, but other people prefer other methods. Being dynamic with your offering by giving multiple avenues for participation is vital to a community being able to thrive.
As I mentioned, the chat is supplement to the forums, not a drain on them. Chat gets 1/10th the activity that the forums do, even today. But that 10% of activity the chat gets, I think is still vital and worth while.
[quote=“David”]I’m in the minority it seems, which isn’t all that unusual, but I actually fully agree with Jimmy. Our forum has thousands (and likely tens of thousands) fewer posts than it should because so much of the discussion occurs in the chatbox between our core community members.
We need to remember that a universal truth to almost every social gathering place on the internet is the 1% rule (alternatively called the 90-9-1 rule). In short, we would all prefer the chatbox because it fuels personal connections between us, but it actually harms the dispersion of information to the 99% of people who are not contributing to it, nor reading it.
Think about when you first decided to look into PPCoin or Peercoin. What search method did you use? I know for myself reading through bitcointalk and peercointalk threads was where most of my research took place. When I saw a coin with a ton of posts and views, it naturally piqued my interest further. We’re creatures of social proof, and if that truism holds here, we’re actively harming our community by not facilitating the creation of material that can be easily searched by curious onlookers. Combing through blocks of chat records doesn’t have the same ease in my opinion.
If the community feels the chatbox is a uniquely Peercoin selling feature, that’s great. I will be lobbying hard against the inclusion of one in any NuBits forums (if they are created) however. There is too much value in putting all discussions down in permanent form to do otherwise.[/quote]
Thanks for your support, David! You wrote better than me. Sorry for my English.
I do suggest to move the chat box to a subforum for the members who want to communicate in a public and fast way, and better to update the chat in a thread for more people. CBX is indeed a great way for the core members group working and communication.
But Peercoin and the forum is for all of the users who are using/holding or potentially will use/hold it, not only for the core members. I think most of the new users can’t catch up the cbx. Anything in public, especially the Peercoin discussion in the cbx, I think, can be recorded to get more publicity and let people as reference to know more about Peercoin. Chat is an instant/online communication, but forum post is an “offline” communication. Conference speech is an instant/online/face-to-face communication, but essay/academic/white paper are “offline” communication, which can benefit for more people at different places and different time. Asking questions in the cbx is less efficient, because cbx can only answer the question for the only one who asked question. The experts in the cbx need to answer once again next time. I hope the question and answer can help more people in a forum thread way.
This time I agree with ppcman, the cbx and forums are not mutually exclusive but complementary. Same as with Twitter, Facebook etc. I have seldom been involved in a chat discussion relevant for Peercoin which didn’t also had a forum post. And numbers of posts is not a good count imo, number of quality posts is. And I think we win from those other forums on quality.
I think if you take the chat away, you would also change the way this community works and not necessarily for the better. I don’t think restraining the social fabric and some type of communications is the way to go.
Maybe we just set up some basic chat rules, that in case something is discussed relevant to peercoin and is not in a thread that we just self-moderate to create that thread and continue discussion. I’ve already seen that happening a couple of times. I’ve been actively referring people with ideas to the threads or made a post myself.
And maybe we have to get a bit more clever with forum technology and show the what’s hot and what’s the latest more prominent so people are more invited to join discussions taking place in the forums. Automatically updating the news links can be a way to go.
Edit: And including an RSS feed on the peercoin.net website so people can see what is going on and join the discussion in the forum.
I think moving the recent posts section between the chat and the rest of the boards might help. I never look at it because it’s all the way at the bottom of the forum.
Removing the chat window is unacceptable in my opinion. There’s so many things that I do and I rely on that chat to communicate with other members about new threads and things of importance. Removing it would cut one of my main communication links with the community. It’s the one place where I know people are guaranteed to see my announcements.