One big mega awesome sweet chat room! But yeah seriously think of that, if you dont want to wait for a reply for a quick simple question you could just go to the chat room that a pretty common, simple chat box to see if someone is on that could help. you could just use your forum login to login into that.

Just a pretty cool suggestion IMO

I'm sorry to burst your bubble but we did have this a while ago(2004 when we moved here from the other form) and it didn't work out all that well. I wonder if it would work better now with the new software added.

can you say how long ago, cause i joined this place awhile back and dont remember hearing anything about it

I'm pretty sure it was 2004.

yup awhile ago lol. i dont know it was just a suggestion that could be pretty fun.

You should know, I think...
Anyhow, there is one.
Try a magical search.

yes well i thank you for the link but i was looking for one maybe in this site. which would mean it be way coooler on this site

The problem with a chat room is that the resources are lost after the conversations is over. At least with posts, if a good question is asked, and has good information, it's around permanently (we hope).

I don't think an official chat room is a bad idea, and would certainly have more of a chance of being successful than four years ago since there are a lot more people. However there is always a greater risk of things getting out of hand if the room is pretty much wide open. I'll give that gabbly room a try though, at least for a little while when I get a chance.

Gabbly says it doesn't support Firefox. That greatly annoys me.

@Sausage:
If the chat was run within the forum, could a log be enabled? Or maybe something like gmail chat where everything is indexed and wrapped in a nice search index function.
I wonder if there's a way to tag good questions/answers/info realtime in a chat. It would make sifting through a bunch of "hi, how are you" type messages a lot easier.
It would also require the people in the chat to use the tagging function and for it's correct purpose, but we tend to police things pretty well on here.

How is that a problem and not a feature?

I would rather not do a chat room for two reasons. First of all, you can get replies quick enough on the forum. Secondly, there could be valuable information in the chat room that other people would want to know, and I know I wouldn't want to search through the logs to find it. I think the forum system we have right now is great.

I use Firefox 2.0.0.17 and Gabbly works perfectly for me.

How about an IRC channel for twistypuzzles?

If the conversations are regarding materials, availability, techniques, etc.

I don't think that's really a problem. Besides, if the question comes up on the forum about the very thing discussed in chat, then people who were in the chat can't very well say "search chat!"

I'm willing to give the chat thing a chance for a while. But it sure is quiet right now in that gabbly room.

I vote yes. Doesn't even need to be on the site, so nobody has to do maintenance or anything.