We need a Chat Room for Christmas!!!!!

Hi Again friends! I think that a chat room could be really useful for all the members. Everyone would love talking with different people of different countries! Imagine how easy for us would be talking about fitting clubs, ideas for this website, golf instruction, etc. Maybe it´s difficult to talk with people from other continents because of the local time, but there are always more than one member joined at the same time and this idea will give us the opportunity to know each other better and to stablish a "special room" for talking about our passion: GOLF. In my opinion, a chat room would be the best present that anyone from here could get for Christmas.

i like your thinking, perhaps santa will bring us one for christmas.

im with you guys that would be a great addition to the site

We talked about this a while ago, and the main prob that stopped us was the need for moderators full time. And only opening up the room while a moderator was available was not a great solution. We are having a hard enough time with all the cr@p in just the normal discussion boards. If you all clean it up, who knows...

I dont what you mean Greg
Surely there is no cr@p flying around......is there?

I figure to get a chat room area is easy but to have it utilized requires more effort because you need discussion at peak login times - to capture the interest of the users. Unfortunately with an international forum like this one this would require constant discussion, because login times could be 12h apart or have a double peak - peak in Europe then peak again in North America but ~5h apart.

We have a chat room on my "local" forum (note this forum is usually at the top of google searches (not sponsored) for the terms "golf" and "forum"), but there is never anyone on it so it remains empty. I figure this is because the number of "actual" contributors to the site is very small, so there is not enough overlap in login time even though we are all in the same time zone and for most of the members the same city.

An internet forum has a "1% rule"
Where for a 100 people online: 1 will create content, 10 will interact with it (comment or offer improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
[Edited because I found the article.
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/wee...823959,00.html]


Gandalf will weigh the pros and cons to decide whether it is feasible, but keep in mind:

How many people have kept their "blog" up to date?

Is a 'mod bot' a viable option?

A what what?

A 'mod bot' ? I don´t know what u mean, but anyway, forums are really helpfull for all the community. I just proposed the chat because it would be nice to talk with people about golf. Maybe, if we could just send private messages to the people who is on-line, that would be the first step and we ´ll see how that works. Would it be viable? we don´t need a moderator in a chat room, we could just have a room where anyone could sign in and see if there is anybody to talk. I assume that all the members here are kind and have respect for everyone, that´s why we won´t need a moderator to control or censure bad words or bad advices.

A 'mod bot' is an automated police 'user' that would hang out in the chat room, censoring and what not - basically doing what we'd request a moderator to do.