Dead Chat
 

Seems like everytime I view the chat, all I see are idle members, no matter what time of the day. Is the chat that dead?

I had a little idea to maybe make it more noticeable people are in chat, in short just change "Chat" to "Chat (X)", X being the number of people in the chat, and only show the X if there is atleast one person.

Obviously from the vB end you won't be able to tell who is on though IRC (unless you made a plugin on that side I guess), but you could easily check user sessions to see who's on that page.

The flaw with that ofcourse is the session will expire, but that could be overcome, a little simple bit of javascript which records mouse moments and times and fires a session update through AJAX every x minutes if mouse movements are not idle.

Ofcourse, If I've just been very unlucky and the chat is not dead, feel free to ignore all that :p

It is not the most active channel, that is true.

but what we very often see is someone joining, ask a question (often even without reading the welcome message) and leave if nobody answers within a minute. Most who are online are not watching IRC all, they do other stuff and check for new messages once in a while, so waiting a bit longer might help.

But i have to admit that i also often don't start it anymore.

I've never even tried the chat. :o

What chat???

Maybe it would be a good idea to list it on the home page.

It is in the navbar on each page.

:cool: FedEx me some glasses.

Everytime I've been in there it's always been dead. I'd expect in the run up to xmas it won't be any active.

I visited it today and it's so dead.

Make it a tab perhaps?

a tab for unvisited content?!.. we already have the essential tabs we need, thanks...

It's like the appendicitis of vB :D

too elitist, ppl there don't want to answer

p.s. Or maybe Forums causes a repetitive answering without the face to face factor?

face to face i don't know, but they answer more quickly on the forum than the chat... so i suppose it's easier for everybody to talk on the forum... live chat is for me a specific thing for direct support, where you answer each phrase instead of a thread...

Except the chat rules for the channel say specifically that it isn't for support. It's just for chatting.

Are you shy, Lynne? ;)
:erm: Like Alfa1, I never realized there was a chat.:o

To make people more aware that it is there...