The BeatGear Cavern

Any plans to have a chat room for the BGC? I think it would be a good way for everyone to get to know each other better, It has worked well for other forums I've used.

-Ed

cool idea

Why not just use Skype (free software) and actually speak? Skype allows for a group conversation. MikeB has even added a Skype button to each user's information shown.

Skype is no good for those of us like me and Knobs, who are stuck on dial-up. Besides, aren't we chatting now?

I am for the idea of a chat room.

It would help reduce some of the more mundane or inane chatter in the forums. Threads get pushed off the page so quickly these days, it almost seems like a waste of time to spend any effort writing a post, since it gets forgotten and abandoned pretty quickly.

Chat room banter comes and goes, it doesn't get saved to disk like every post here (and alot of people use it to simply say "+1" or "i agree") which also ends up clogging up the archives for searching, etc.

It's also different from Skype in that you can meaningfully have more than 10 people in the chatroom all contributing to a conversation at the same time. That's not gonna happen on voice.

I believe there are some chat modules for phpBB that can be considered.

Any more thought on this? I found a guitar building forum with a chat and it's great fun.