Others have expressed an interest in a chat, and there is one installed. Don't get me wrong, it's a good idea, however at this time I don't want to use it.
Reasons
1) A chat is temporary, posts are forever
2) Unless the chat is organized, very few users will use it unless there are lots of them online. Even then, a chat is temporary, posts are forever.
3) A chat won't help me with search engine results because it's temporary data, posts are archived forever and are static to help with search engines and bookmarks.
4) Chats can use tons of system resources. They can use lots of CPU usage that needs to be kept for other sites on this server and for this site itself. The server needs to run fast and efficiently so that search engines can query it nicely and easily and so users don't experience lag.
5) 1.2TB of bandwidth per month (for those not familiar a TB is 1000GB) and an 80GB drive to run websites that take up less than 4GB. Server space isn't a problem and shouldn't be for a very long time to come.
6) Cost isn't an issue for a decent chat script.
Solutions to your dilemma. In your control panel you have it set to send you an email for each reply to a thread. Change that to digest and it will notify you once per day only.
Now, as for chats I was thinking we could have moderated chats once in a while. If we could get a company rep come to the forum and let users ask them questions (moderated) they could answer them about specific topics.
For example we could have a rep from Blata (Robert) come for an hour or whatever and let everyone interested ask him questions on products he sells. The questions are moderated by myself and he only has to answer serious enquiries.
After the Q&A period the moderation is lifted and it's general chat for a while.
Another possibility is that we could set a chat up for a specific time weekly (say wednesday at 8PM CST or whatever) and anyone who wants to join can hop on in for a couple of hours.
So, a chat now, not really. A chat in the future, absolutely. |