I thought I might want to put this out there. Most people would like to have a chat room for groups. I think it would be a good idea for each group to have a chatroom of its own as it gets created.
I know this presents a problem to users once you start having a lot of groups on your site. First off, if you have a large number of groups, then chat would be very hard to navigate as it is. I’m not in favor of letting non group members be able to see your chatroom, or browse it if they don’t belong to it.
Perhaps there is a way to Structure Ray chat, so that it reads the user’s group membership, and only shows you the chatrooms of the groups that you belong to. That way you can have a large number of rooms, but the user is not faced with trying to navigate them all. They see what applies to them, and that can also cut down on a lot of lurking in chat.
Make Meaning Or Die
Also another option that may even be better is that the group chats are invisible in the regular chat. You have to go directly to the group site to find the chat room in which it is totally seperate and you cannot find it without being a member of the group. Much like how Orca works in the groups, it is totally separate.
Yah im still around … trying to figure out what we can do to make chat a much more excitting compact for vistitors
humm… sounds good! but to only show the chatrooms of the groups that you belong to will not rock because it will prevent people from viewing or accessing any other user’s group chatroom. Many people like to know what is going on in other chatrooms.
I love doing that in yahoo public chat, hi5 chat etc… I spend 5 to 7 minutes in a chatroom and then move to another one and so forth until i find a room with subjects/topics that i am really interested in.
A good practice could be to nest all group chatrooms into a collapsible menu with a generic name let says: Group Chatrooms.
Inside Group Chatrooms we will have:
Example:
Whatever Group chat A
Whatever Group chat B
Whatever Group chat C
and so forth.
With a collapsible menu (expand/collapse), we won’t have a long list of group chatrooms in the main room.
.Dotnet
Well I think there should be a chat menu before entering chat and it dispays the different countries and cities of nearest chat rooms with private rooms for groups and moderators …
Something like Google Map ( chat ) this would be great