I’ve been playing with the idea of proposing a chat feature for this forum. Before you jump to a conclusion of how you think this might work, or how it might work in conjunction with the amazing community/form Leo has going here, read the following blog by Discourse (the platform this forum is built on).
The two platforms can be quite complementary to each other. The “live” chat function could reduce the silly chatter in the forum. The forum would be referenced if there’s a question that’s already answered, or information is being shared that should be documented in the “long term memory” of the forum.
The one thing that’s required for this to work are solid, reliable, trustworthy admins/moderators. I can imagine several scenarios where having chat would be helpful/worthwhile, but without good moderators, this will be a short/failed experiment.
With that, I’d like to hear from those that think this would be a good idea.
I’d like to hear from constructive criticism for those that really think maybe this shouldn’t happen.
Mostly, I’d like to hear from volunteers that would consider helping moderate.
Personally I would probably prefer to stay the way we have it. That could be because I feel I am already in too many Discord / Slack groups. I don’t know that we have enough chatter or people posting all the time to need a separate chat app. Though I can understand how some people would find that useful. I like how we have it now that I don’t feel like I am missing any of the discussions, where I do feel that with Discord / Slack often.
It seems like the idea behind this is to reduce asking questions that have already been answered and general low-effort chatter on this forum, in which case I support this because I will just ignore the chat entirely…
I want everyone to see my silly chatter. Also I do actually like this idea, but I don’t know that people won’t still ask questions that have been answered because there’s a chat platform.
That’s kind of the same thought I had, and the same take away I had from that article. So perhaps it’s an option we have that is most frequently used during short term memory situations like meet ups or other similar events.