yuno irc

[Lacquer Head]

I've seen a few threads about various chat rooms, so I thought I'd take a crack at it. Why not start an IRC room? It's honestly not as hard as people make it out to be when it comes to moderation. A site like this would probably have what, 20-30 members on the irc channel? If that? There are various clients like pidgin (yeah yeah, i know...pidgin...) that let you log onto various IMs and IRC. So you could use the same client for MSN as IRC.

I would recommend mibbit for an in browser link, it's not that great of a client, but it's great for casual users. If I'm online (which is a lot) I'm on irc. It's great for lurkers like myself lol but really, setting up a room on a server, making a mibbit link and setting up the widget takes all of 20 minutes.

[Martin]

Fair enough, but a lot of the regular members just either use various IMs to talk with one another, Skype, Windows Live Messenger etc.

Also, it could also have a detrimental effect on the level of posting activity because some threads would just go into IRC and not actually on the forums. Just a thought.

[SOLDIER #819]

It's been my experience that when you get a bunch of people from the forum together, activity begets more activity. So the IRC channel can be a good thing. Only...

Have to find a way to do it that makes it easily accessible (without a separate client) and that doesn't run TFF's server into the ground.

As it stands, TFFers can be on one of three different clients, so it's hard to coordinate a simple chat. Could be nice. Though since it's an official TFF thing, you run into the problem of moderation. Some people don't mix well together, I assume.

[Lacquer Head]

There are plenty of other separate servers you can make a room on for free. A mibbit link would take absolutely no bandwidth. You can either embed it in a page or just give an external client for simplicity. As for people not liking each other, use the ignore function for **** sakes. Rules from a forum transfer over to an IRC room, so if people break the rules, they can get a kick or a ban.

[Merlin]

I don't see how it could possibly be moderated at all times. What about spam bots and file bots?

[Lacquer Head]

In all the years I have been on IRC, I have never dealt with that lol but I usually use rizon which is pretty well protected against stuff like that. But, if the issue is the forums staff not having the time to be around a lot, generally you just find trustworthy people that are online a lot and have a few people to cover various hours of the day. It's really not as hard as it seems. Rizon itself hosts various big and small sites, 4chan being the most well known. IRC is just as easy to moderate as a forum, if not easier. The staff can also use a jumper and log if need be. Jumpers are a separate program that leaves you logged on 24/7, even when you turn off your PC.

[SOLDIER #819]

We could also setup an IRC channel and just sort of... leave it, without moderation. Heh. We can't possibly ask the mods to be around 24/7. People could just collect and do as they please. Wouldn't be much different from any other chat client, other than that it's accessible from the TFF site. Slap on a Terms of Service saying that the staff don't moderate nor take responsibility for the content of the channel, and let 'er rip.

It may be worthwhile to trust the members just this once. If it doesn't work out, we can remove the link from the site.

[Lacquer Head]

That would be a horrible idea lol an unmoderated room would devolve to trolling and drama, hurting the image of the site. Moderation is easy, if the site staff can't, as I said before, op various other members that are online a lot.

[SOLDIER #819]

Oh ye of little faith. =P Given what is already posted in public, I'm not sure how this chat could hurt the site's image.

That said, you'd need to find people who are willing to sit for 4+ hours at a time in the chat and are willing to be fair (like, REALLY fair) and put up with lots of drama, given your worst case scenario. And it won't be that active, so it'd be like guarding a tumbleweed most of the time. While advisable for a big community, it's unrealistic for TFF. I mean, we could give mods access to chat logs to corroborate complaints and then warn them accordingly on the forums, but I wouldn't ask much more of the staff's limited time.

Seriously, even if you can get someone to agree with that, it's not as if they'd actually do it. Without some degree of trust, this idea is going to be DOA like most other plans on this site.

[Merlin]

Years ago people would just make a TFF channel in AIM or whatever and people would just join it. If it went dead for a few hours, someone else would start it up later on. The only solid connection to TFF was a thread where people would post the chat room name. That way TFF members could chat amongst themselves but if any shit went down in there, the site wasn't liable for it because we didn't make it... YOU did.

[Lacquer Head]

I've been a mod for smaller and larger sites, it really just depends on the time. Discussions happen a lot. It's easy to find a few mods. The easiest way is for mods to log the conversation. If you leave your PC on, you can let the IRC run in the background and it logs everything said in a word file. To properly moderate it, you DO have to rely on the members. If you see something going wrong, you have to report it. If no one reports anything, there is no problem.

[SOLDIER #819]

So all we really would need is a bot to log convos to corroborate reports. Fair enough.

Though it sounds like what Merlin is saying is to just go ahead, post an IRC thread in general chat and invite everyone in without linking it to the staff. That's about the best we're going to get out of this until someone takes the initiative.

[Lacquer Head]

I can set one up if no one wants an official one >_> but official ones are kewler

[SOLDIER #819]

Please do. If we can get enough activity for it we can always get it sanctioned later.

If it's posted up in GC we can give links to Firefox/Chrome IRC add-ons, or whatever browser-based ones exist.