Shoutbox Debate Club

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Hey everyone. Discourse updated a feature with a shoubox/live chat service. Took me a second to configure since the custom site theme made it sort of broken. (The custom CSS for this site is like 800 lines long and full of a lot of band-aid selectors, ahaha. I wanna clean it up to publish it on git for posterity eventually.)

Anyways I’ve added a link to this new chat from the navbar but you can find it here too: Chat #irc

I’ve said this in the past but I’m pretty hesitant to attach any other kind of site to this, especially not something like a discord, so i’m weary about even a shoutbox being the wrong move. We’re small enough that I don’t anticipate too many people being logged in at the same time or it to even function as a chatroom.

I can say for certain I won’t turn it into like, 1100 different chat channels. I don’t see any reason to have more than just the one at this time anyways. there wont be a #memes ever ever, sorry.

I mostly feel like the benefit would be having a page for checking in every day or so even if you don’t have much to post. I don’t wanna ever obsess about daily login metrics but having a spot to say hi sounds like a reasonable approach.

The genuine concern seems to be whether this would take away from discussion on any actual threads. If i post a link in the shoutbox to a cool article or tweet, maybe there should just be a cool tweet/blog thread, “pics that go hardcoregaming101” etc. I do want more generic topics like that but don’t wanna flood things with my own ideas for threads lol

Another point kdx brought up was archival. I already configured it to keep the shoutbox log indefinitely, but the default is to clear out messages after 90 days. Tentatively it’s fine to archive forever but maybe a short limit would encourage the chatter to be small pleasantries, too. IDK how much storage they take up but it’s not worrying yet. most the other settings feel pretty inconsequential.

but lets talk about it… talking!

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i thought about it since, and my final opinion is grosso modo “let’s try and see”, if people start sharing cool progress updates in the shoutbox we could try luring them away to creating a thread. about that, might be cool to have a thread for small tests/prototypes/ideas, i tend to start a lot of stuff i don’t ever want to continue that are worth sharing, and i would bet i’m not the only one here

we need a facebook-core meme thread though

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i think that fading messages on the shoutbox would be great! pushing towards having it for idle chit-chat and smalltalk feels like the right approach.

if it’s feasible, it might even be nice to create something like a shoutbox-limit for how often you can post there, kind of like a discord thread in slow-mode. the reason i suggest this is that it would significantly reduce the mental load of moderating the shout-box, which isn’t an issue at the moment, but could feasibly turn into one at later points, or if we ever get, yknow…
b o t - p r o b l e m s . . . :robot:

overall i stick by my thought that the shoutbox is a nice idea that helps stay more in touch with the forum community.