It would be amazing to have an AJAX-powered chat feature that stores chats in a PM When engaged in a transaction, you can go back and forth in PMs constantly, and it's time consuming as well as inbox consuming. Then I go back and delete previous PMs, as the most recent PMs usually contain the whole thread It would be sooooooo much more efficient to be able to chat...
Wouldn't it be easier to use a normal chat client (AIM, MSN, etc.)? You can click on the icon for a user to automatically launch it and start chatting.
Not really, for the following reasons: 1. many people use different clients, and few use a unified client that can access multiple protocols 2. I don't want to have to add a buddy just to be able to sell a link 3. If I'm using DP at work, I may not have admin rights to install an IM 4. The chat history could be stored online, on DPs servers with your profile, not on one machine 5. No need to even run an extra application, do it all in the web browser 6. Chats could be linked to threads for documentation's sake
Yeh it is easier but for me i like the idea to have general chat room here, it will save the bandwidth or you prefer threads than chathin for SE
Shawn's advice is better because it will avoid further occupied disk space or server stress. If it's a quick message use PM's. If it's a long conversation use email or a chat service.
I can see both sides of the story here. I use both mediums. However, for speed. Chatting is certainly quicker. The downfall of having inbuilt chat on DP is keeping history. This would take up a lot of server space. I always keep my history of chats with MSN, YM & Skype especially for any deals going on. Good call Shawn. Col
But look at gmail. Every gmail client could just as quickly use google talk, but google integrated chat to be more efficient Chat would be less resource/bandwidth intensive than PMs, because you'd be sending smaller packets of data to have the same conversation You wouldn't be sending the past conversation quoted. You wouldn't have to navigate through the PM inbox or reply screen and download images/text/css/js files. The server wouldn't have to fire off an email to notify of a PM One quick screen, and few hits to the server, and KAPOW! (batman style), the coversation/deal is closed in 1/10 the time it took to exchange PMs or fire up your IM
History definitely wouldn't be an option if something were to happen (which truthfully probably isn't). I already had to make some vBulletin plug-ins to auto-delete PMs after 90 days because of the disk space they were taking. For every bit of data within the forum, it's actually stored 8 times... The forum uses 4 database servers acting as a single cluster (each server has all the data), and then each server replicates it's whole disk storage so it has a mirror in case any drive fails. So in reality everything is written to 2 different places on each server multiplied by 4 database servers. There has been almost 1.8M PMs passing through the forum. If each PM averages 1k (which they average more), that would be 1.8GB x 8 storage locations = 14.4GB of storage just for PMs (again, that's if we let users keep them indefinitely).
I understand that. But like I said, PMs average more than 1Kb simply because they quote all previous PMs. With an AJAX chat, you'd be sending smaller packets (a couple hundred bytes max), and the entire conversation could be saved as only one PM. If they average conversation/deal requires 3 PMs sent and 3 received, you could cut that down to 1. That's 1/6 of the storage space, at a minimum
Userplane has a free version of their hosted chat: http://www.userplane.com/webchat/ But I don't know if this is DP's spirit.
I'm not talking about shooting the breeze chatting. No, I don't think that is DPs spirit. I merely see it as an efficient means for facilitating transactions via PM
I like the idea, but it wouldnt work on DP. Read shawns posts, they tell you the exact reasons why. Rob
That's a somewhat lame comment. No, they don't tell the exact reasons why it wouldn't work, they only indicate that indefinite storage is not possible. That's fine, expire them after 90 days still, but at least you'd have the whole converstation stored in one PM for that 90 days
Good idea in a sense, But could you imagine the crowd that would be in the chat, and then imagine if the political talk started in the chat.....forget it , we would need chat police ... And is seems that the b/s/t does well without it...
Hello Please if you can add a live chat mod, it will make our life much easier, i have a lot of clients from Digitalpoint and each time, we need to set appointments in MSN, Yahoo.. sometimes the client dont have msn.., to keep it short please if you can add live chat with the possibility of a private discussion between 2 members then it will really be amazing. thanks a lot.