Since the site will now show who’s online, it seems like a natural extension to add a real-time private chat feature for registered members. Possibly to avoid nuisance spammers and trolls, it might be setup to only be active after a new person has posted say, 20 posts or comments. It would be nice if members that have been reading each others’ comments for years could talk in real time without having to give out their information for all to see.
Obviously it would be up to the sponsors and developers to make this a reality, but I was wondering what everyone thought of the idea?
Good idea! Would also allow for realtime car help. Nothing sucks more than having a question about the brake job you’re halfway through and having to wait for someone to reply to your post
Just think how useful this feature would have been a few weeks ago, as “colt” ran up something like 9 pages of bandwidth with stream of consciousness ramblings about his old Dodge Colt. He could have chatted personally with many of us on that topic!
Call me antisocial, but I don’t like chat features. On anything I use that has a chat feature, I leave it turned off. So if there’s a chat feature it ought to have an opt out button. If anyone would care to share a private word with anyone else I believe that there is a private message function for everyone. You get there by clicking on a user name. Those I never object to b/c I can then deal with them according to my own time of choosing.
@cigroller; Pretty much all sites that have a chat feature have an option to be invisible or turn the chat off. And no you are not antisocial, I am an extremely social person, but when I am somewhere online taking care of business, I want to focus on what I am trying to achieve and move on. When a window pops up that someone wants to chat, then you are stuck there. Its like having caller ID on your phone and screening the calls.
@galant, its true that I’ve yet to come across any site that does chatting without the “off” option. But I was sort of thinking that if anyone would make a mess out of this it would be the new web hosts for this site. So I figured I’d at least toss that out there.
I’m not unhappy with the site, btw, so I’m not wanting to pick on the Vanilla folks - the the glitches haven’t been in short supply.
Perhaps instead of the web equivalent of instant messaging they should institute a chat room. You can drop in if you want, or stay out if you don’t like such things. That’d give the added advantage of, like the forum, having several people who can bounce ideas back and forth when answering questions.
