Why no live chat?

[dmfelicia]

Hey wouldn't it be cool if there was a live chat portion of this site? Why don't we have that? It would be nice to talk to people in real time sometimes. Or would that take away from the forum part of the site? I could imagine a tool where if a person asks a specific question and people in the chat want to answer they hit a button and it automatically becomes a thread. Then the archival information of that discussion is preserved.

 

[bamabikeguy]

Notice that stat at the bottom?

Most users ever online was 3,284, 05-27-2009 at 06:08 AM

I never looked in the chat room, but when they had it running, there would be 2-3,000 "guests" checking out that feature.

Wonder what caused that moth/flame phenomeanon?

At the bottom of this page are 5 threads about "chat", one of them might show the reasonings.

 

[srdavo]

been there.... tried that

http://www.motoredbikes.com/showthread.php?t=25302

 

[bamabikeguy]

So, those thousands of guests were spam bots?

Folks should know thats what the introductory thread is about, to swat spam from the get go.

 

[dmfelicia]

I think a chat properly implemented is doable. Here are the problems followed by solutions:
Problem: Solution
1) Spammers : Only members can use the chat rooms.
2) Size of room: Have multiple rooms with size limits (25-50 people max?)
3) Inappropriate conversations : have a feature to vote people out of room who are being offensive. Only a person with enough votes can be kicked out. If you get voted out a certain number of times you get kicked out of the site.
Also it would be good if there was an IM feature that way two people who are chatting in a room could break out in a private live conversation. I guess exchanging IM info is just the same.

Any thoughts