Chat Help Needed

[Steve_Honeycutt]

As some may have read, I have been named Chat Administrator. I will need some assistance with this responsibility. I am looking for assistance on the following topics:

Policies - These would be suggested changes to current policies and possibly new policies. These policies would be submitted to the BOD for approval.

Chat Features - Determining which features we would like to test before embarking on this journey.

Schedule - How often do we want to have a routine chat session? What day and time of the week?

Selecting Themes - In an earlier e-mail, I had made some suggestions on themes that we could take a year or so to explore. Other ideas are welcome. Would reviving the new member chat be worthwhile?

Selecting Guests to Invite - I have some ideas, but these need to be vetted in a larger group before implementation. I am also interested in other ideas.

Promotion of Events - How do we get the news out to the membership?

I would be especially interested to talk with anyone who may have done something like this before.

Steve Coles has established a group that this discussion can take place in. If interested, you will need to join the group. To be notified of group posts, you will also need to subscribe to the group.

I think this has great potential, but like other ideas, this will take some effort to make it successful. Please join the Chat group. If you can't figure out how, PM me and I will give you directions.

Steve

 

[ScottM]

Folks please help Steve out with your suggestions. Even if it good to continue the chats as was done in the past.

 

[ehpoole]

First, welcome aboard Steve. I am grateful that you chose to step up and take ownership of this feature and help drum up more interest in our online chat feature.

My thoughts on some of your issues:

Policies
We should not need any wholesale changes to our site Policies. For the most part we just want to ensure good, fair, and friendly conduct in our chats -- the same as anywhere else on our site. It does not hurt to rehash this issue, though sometimes it is best to amend our Policy ad-hoc when problems arise rather than trying to pre-concieve every possible issue that might someday arise.

Chat Features
I'm assuming we are talking about chat topics since the "chat features" of our chat solution are pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get. It appears to be a pretty decent solution, seems to scale well, and we seem to have worked most of the glitches out of it now (including a few annoying issues with Internet Explorer 9 rendering)...

One capability that you may not be aware of is the ability to create additional "Rooms" within the chat system. By default all users start out in the "Chat Lobby" and most chats occur in this Lobby. But user's can create their own rooms under the Chat Lobby that incoming guests can then navigate to. These additional rooms automatically vanish when all the user count drops to zero (i.e. they are not permanent).

My "Who's Chatting" widget does not display the user's lobby if they are in the Chat Lobby, however when users navigate to a user-created "Room" the name of the chat room that user currently resides in will appear next to their name in parenthesis.

Selecting Themes
I think you have selected two great themes to get started: 1) a weekly new-user chat (which also needs a commitment on the part of regulars so the new-users have someone to converse with) and 2) a Monthly topic-oriented conversation.

My thoughts are that we should first focus on establishing these two events to "get into the groove of things" and it will give us a chance to work out any unforeseen kinks. We can then focus on trying to expand the list further.

Selecting Guests to Invite
I'm afraid I'm not of much help on this topic, but the lists you have presented in the past seem pretty well thought out and a great way to kick things off... These can either be monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly features depending upon how much work they prove to be with regard to organizing and promoting them adequately.

Promotion of Events
With regard to the regularly schedules events (it is not practical for ad-hoc events) I may be able to help you out there. The code for the Who's Chatting sidebar widget could be extended to include rotating notices and reminders for upcoming events.

Like I said, it is not really practical for one-off or ad-hoc events, but may well be doable for regularly schedules recurring events (such as a weekly new-user chat).

 

[Angex]

Steve,
I am not sure what all I can help you with but please let me know. I will take on anything you want to hand out. I will help out with what I can. I will start to throw some ideas at you. I have taken and am certified in Cisco and Microsoft. So I am pretty familiar with those products if that helps any.

Connor

 

[Steve_Honeycutt]

Connor,

Thank you for the offer. It will be good to have someone with your skills. I would like to start next week. The first thing I think we need to do is look at the features available and choose which ones we want to test. Once these are determined, we may have to propose changes to current policies or new policies. I would also like to start up the new member chat again on a regular basis. This will probably be a little trial and error to see what works best. After we have some successful sessions behind us, I would like to seek some well-known woodworkers to invite for a chat. These are just some of my ideas. I look forward to hearing your ideas.

Steve

 

[cskipper]

Thank you for accepting this position.

 

[b4man]

Thank you for accepting this position.

+1:icon_thum

 

[SteveColes]

Steve, a suggestion, if you don't mind. People have posted that they are interested in helping but you are not getting many/any people actually joining the group.

The group admin menu has the ability for you to send out invitations to join. Just send invitations to those that have expressed interest and those that you would like to help you. I think you will be surprised.

 

[Steve_Honeycutt]

Steve,

Good suggestion. I'll send out some invitations.

Steve

 

[ehpoole]

For those interested in jointing the Chat Admin group, simply click on the "Groups" button from the top menu bar (second level) and then navigate to the "Chat Admin" group and click on the "Join Group" link. If, by chance, you have already navigated into the actual "Chat Admin" group, then you can join by clicking on the "Group Tools" pull down menu (upper portion of the screen, right-hand side) and selecting the "Join Group" option and following the instructions to approve the action.

If you wish to receive email notification of posts and threads in the Chat Admin group, click on the "Group Tools" pull down menu (upper portion of screen, right-hand side) and select the "Subscribe to this Group" option, then specify on the following screen how you prefer to be notified of new content (through control panel notifications -- the "Notifications" link at the top of your screen where PMs are also indicated -- or via either daily or weekly email digests).

Like Steve, I would encourage interested parties to join the group (if you change your mind later you can easily unsubscribe and/or un-join).

We should initially focus on simple ideas to get things started and then expand from there ... but first we have to get started. I would like to suggest that we go ahead and try to commit to resurrecting the Weekly New-Member Chats that we used to run. We can either stick to the old schedule (Thursdays at either 7pm or 10pm IIRC) or we can pick a new day and/or time. Personally, I think 8pm is probably a better time as 7pm is too close to some people's dinner time and 10pm is after some members bedtime. We might also want to decide whether or not weekends would be better. Whatever we do we should make sure that the day of the week will not conflict with our monthly/bi-monthly/quarterly Guest Speaker chats on varied topics.

I would be happy to work on a modification to my Chat Widget that would display reminders of upcoming chat events and we can also use the Events Calendar for that purpose as well.