this place needs a..

quote:

If we were going to do chat we would house the software on our server. May cost more upfront but leaves us with full control and ownership.

Should we have a chat room? I don't think so. Here are my reasons:

1.) The chat is not stored and searchable from the forum. The nice thing about forums is you can read old posts to find your answers. With chat, only the people chatting get to learn the info and once they leave, no one else can read what they wrote.

2.) The topic will not be about bodybuilding. People will quickly jump from "What do you think of ****" to "Where do you live? Male or Female? Age? Hair Color?" See where I'm going? I have never seen a chat room where people are only speaking of the topic on hand. When my friend and I in High-school made our first website (http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Stage/1795/) we added a chat feature to it after a few months. We thought it would be cool to have people talk about guitars/amps/effects/tab... and pretty much everything related about guitar. If you watched the forum for an hour or so, you would see over 300 posts with people "flirting" and 1 guy post once saying "Anyone in here play guitar?"

3.) Unless we have thousands of people visiting the forum a day, it will make us look as if no one visits our site. If someone clicks on the chat room and no one is in there, they will think our site is bad and continue searching for a different site.

Now with that said, I do believe there is a good time to use the chat feature. I would like to use it to interview people in the business. Say like once every 2 weeks or once a week have a 2 hour chat scheduled. We would have a *star* speaker at that time. TwinPeak may want to take a crack at a chat time to answer questions. My idea would be for me to contact manufacturers. I would call ISS Research and say "Would you like to have Jay Cutler push your products on our live chat this Wednesday Night? He'll need to be online from 5-7 to answer questions, but he can push whatver you guys would like. ISS of course is going to say "Sure, sounds good to us." For this to happen we would need A LOT of people in that room. ISS would not want to pay Jay to talk online to you, me, and 1 other member. They're going to want to get their products mentioned to a bigger crowd. And with that advertising will come Jay Cutlers information. I think this would be a very cool idea for a chat (it will also boost our sales). But we aren't near close enough to begin thinking about setting this up. In the future once we have enough visitors I would not mind spending the money for the software... but right now I don't think it would be a wise idea.