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What happened to the chatroom?!


anjumahmed

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This is terribly distressing. I don't know if most of you on the forums know me, but those who do will know I've been quite the denizen of the chatroom for nearly the past four years. I was real zoo of characters. Mostly amicable, sometimes not - but it was all fun! I'm saddened to see it apparently go, because I feel like I really got to know and learn a great deal from you people.

So will it be coming back, if this is this some kind of transitionary measure the forum upgrades? Or will I be needing to go some place else?

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The chat room has been discontinued and it will not be coming back.

In all the kerfuffle yesterday, I forgot to make an announcement regarding this.

First, they're shutting off the service at the end of April. It did not make a lot of sense to install the chat app to only have to uninstall it after two weeks. (Plus, having it installed was causing some weird issues, and they went away as soon as it was removed.)

Second, I get that some people really like the chat, but it's not used by a large proportion of the user base. There are also so many other alternatives out there that maintaining an official FDR chat doesn't really seem necessary.

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56 minutes ago, JamesP said:

The chat room has been discontinued and it will not be coming back.

In all the kerfuffle yesterday, I forgot to make an announcement regarding this.

First, they're shutting off the service at the end of April. It did not make a lot of sense to install the chat app to only have to uninstall it after two weeks. (Plus, having it installed was causing some weird issues, and they went away as soon as it was removed.)

Second, I get that some people really like the chat, but it's not used by a large proportion of the user base. There are also so many other alternatives out there that maintaining an official FDR chat doesn't really seem necessary.

Well, that's quite sad to hear :(.

This is truly an end of an era. I say that because actually, all the alternative chats don't quite the inclusiveness that draws in the new blood to create the community it became. A Discord chat, which I've heard numerous suggestions for, would honestly just attract a very narrow demographic. It would not attract the 'passers-bys', who can just drop in within two clicks. These are people who are retreating to some niche corner of the internet, these aren't people selecting one of several channels for the intent sake of making use of some trendy VoIP application. On the chat, I've seen:

  • People's deepest neuroses
  • People's realisation of their hopes
  • People's realisation of their regrets
  • People meeting up
  • People getting married
  • People losing touch.
  • People abandoning statism and embracing anarchism, championing libertarianism
  • People abandoning anarchism and embracing statism, championing the alt-right
  • People naively encountering @Tundra with an ethics debate, with great pandemonium.

Good times. And perhaps for the time being we will use the prop-up chat @CaveWoman posted here, and perhaps I will make an effort posting here for the sake of touching base with the community that raised me for quite a long while.

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the issue with "other" chat sites is that it really is not tagged anywhere here as the FDR chat group and will eventually die because, well, nobody knows about it unless they accidentally run across it. I am amazed that it was dropped given the ease to deploy such a thing in most web frameworks. The logic that only a few use it is certainly true, but the same could be said for many "features" that appeared. 

and I will probably get yet another down vote for following up on this but as I am a new subscriber anyway and I was using it a bit almost daily time permitting I guess that makes me one of the few but I had "planned" on using quite often.

Could the site officially link to a chat function else where so that there is a chance people could find it and maybe we could actually have a FDR chat community (which may even grow)?

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15 hours ago, jimofflorida said:

the issue with "other" chat sites is that it really is not tagged anywhere here as the FDR chat group and will eventually die because, well, nobody knows about it unless they accidentally run across it. I am amazed that it was dropped given the ease to deploy such a thing in most web frameworks. The logic that only a few use it is certainly true, but the same could be said for many "features" that appeared. 

and I will probably get yet another down vote for following up on this but as I am a new subscriber anyway and I was using it a bit almost daily time permitting I guess that makes me one of the few but I had "planned" on using quite often.

Could the site officially link to a chat function else where so that there is a chance people could find it and maybe we could actually have a FDR chat community (which may even grow)?

I agree with this, the Chatzy we've set up, I myself doubt is going to survive very long, given it's not really integrated into this community. And as I've mentioned earlier, I'm not a very big fan of Discord. It seems to attract the worst kinds of people.

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  • 2 weeks later...

There are a variety of reasons the board upgrade may have the chat room disabled. There's not much point in speculating. But, ask yourself if you donated more or less because of its presence and ask yourself if how much work it takes to enable and monitor it. Compare that to the value a relatively small number of people gained from it to other features of the board.

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2 hours ago, shirgall said:

There are a variety of reasons the board upgrade may have the chat room disabled.

None of which have been stated as of yet (as far as I've seen. I could be wrong)

There's not much point in speculating.

Sure if the reasons were already given you might be right. But speculating what happened with no explanation isn't exactly weird. 

But, ask yourself if you donated more or less because of its presence and ask yourself if how much work it takes to enable and monitor it. Compare that to the value a relatively small number of people gained from it to other features of the board.

I can only speak from my own experience but I found the discussions in the chat a bit more engaging than the forums. I often got way more responses there than I would by posting a thread of the same topic. Perhaps the problem with chat was that it wasn't promoted as much as it should have been. If moderating was an issue why didn't they try to find someone to volunteer? There are plenty of forums online that have users as mods. It's not exactly an untested model. 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 08/05/2017 at 4:18 PM, shirgall said:

There are a variety of reasons the board upgrade may have the chat room disabled. There's not much point in speculating. But, ask yourself if you donated more or less because of its presence and ask yourself if how much work it takes to enable and monitor it. Compare that to the value a relatively small number of people gained from it to other features of the board.

 
 

I would say I only donated because of its presence ... At the start of it all, I needed somewhere less formal to ask the 'stupid' questions and have the kind of back-and-forth you don't get and isn't appropriate in a forum.

As for the amount of work, it takes very little, I've set them up myself. As for monitoring it, you don't. Mod a few trusted people and you're golden. 

As for the relatively small amount of people, well perhaps they didn't use it much, but I certainly saw a lot of people use it for a short amount of time in the fashion I described above.

It's not a technically challenging piece of software, expensive or troublesome, it's just a standard feature for discussion forums. At the VERY LEAST, setup an official discord or something and make the link available to everyone so we have a place to chat.

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31 minutes ago, Nick900 said:

I would say I only donated because of its presence ... At the start of it all, I needed somewhere less formal to ask the 'stupid' questions and have the kind of back-and-forth you don't get and isn't appropriate in a forum.

As for the amount of work, it takes very little, I've set them up myself. As for monitoring it, you don't. Mod a few trusted people and you're golden. 

As for the relatively small amount of people, well perhaps they didn't use it much, but I certainly saw a lot of people use it for a short amount of time in the fashion I described above.

It's not a technically challenging piece of software, expensive or troublesome, it's just a standard feature for discussion forums. At the VERY LEAST, setup an official discord or something and make the link available to everyone so we have a place to chat.

We have a non-official Discord server. There's no need to autistically screech.

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On 5/13/2017 at 0:41 AM, JamesP said:

Are you saying the reason for not including it is "There are alternatives" and "Not many people use it"? I could say the same thing about use in regards to several sub-boards on this site. This site in general has alternatives (ex: Twitter, Facebook, other message boards, etc) "There are alternatives" is something you could say about just about anything. Now if the reason it didn't come back is because "We didn't specifically want to include that feature anymore", then that's a reason. 

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3 hours ago, Nick900 said:

I would say I only donated because of its presence ... At the start of it all, I needed somewhere less formal to ask the 'stupid' questions and have the kind of back-and-forth you don't get and isn't appropriate in a forum.

As for the amount of work, it takes very little, I've set them up myself. As for monitoring it, you don't. Mod a few trusted people and you're golden. 

As for the relatively small amount of people, well perhaps they didn't use it much, but I certainly saw a lot of people use it for a short amount of time in the fashion I described above.

It's not a technically challenging piece of software, expensive or troublesome, it's just a standard feature for discussion forums. At the VERY LEAST, setup an official discord or something and make the link available to everyone so we have a place to chat.

That's great feedback and I hope they take it into consideration. For me the chat room was most useful when the call-in shows were broadcast live. No so much after that stopped.

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