Whilst an IRC channel might appear a good idea, I do not personally favour it. The main reason for this, is the fact that it would require an immense amount of time for someone to actually go through the conversation logs (if any indeed are kept) and actually archive it in some meaningful form.
Whilst the TalkZones might appear slow, in practice you are only talking a few hours until a problem is solved. Some of us who also subscribe to some of the mailing lists, may also recall a situation where one of the fellow members needed a problem resolving in order to meet an extremely tight deadline. If I recall correctly there were only a couple of hours to meet this deadline.
Within minutes, not one, not two, but three solutions were reached enabling the member to select the best option for them and implement it.
This solution is now available for everyone to share as it is archived, it is stored and it can be searched for.
The problem with an IRC conversation is that there is a very strong, and very real chance that the conversation (and hence the solution) is lost forever. At the end of the day, this benefits the person who had the problem initially, but nobody else can benefit from that knowledge once it is lost.
If you guys create a IRC chat room, i think that the traffic on the web site, forums and everything will drop dramaticly. From one side, it's very nice to have someone who will be there 24/7 to answer to your problem, but, from the other hand... will the users continue posting their problems on the forums? I don't think so, 'cause they will try the chat room. And we all know that everybody is learning something from other people's problems. Just think how many times will you be repeating the same answer to a diferent users? I think too many . . .
Comments
Archive problems....
Whilst an IRC channel might appear a good idea, I do not personally favour it. The main reason for this, is the fact that it would require an immense amount of time for someone to actually go through the conversation logs (if any indeed are kept) and actually archive it in some meaningful form.
Whilst the TalkZones might appear slow, in practice you are only talking a few hours until a problem is solved. Some of us who also subscribe to some of the mailing lists, may also recall a situation where one of the fellow members needed a problem resolving in order to meet an extremely tight deadline. If I recall correctly there were only a couple of hours to meet this deadline.
Within minutes, not one, not two, but three solutions were reached enabling the member to select the best option for them and implement it.
This solution is now available for everyone to share as it is archived, it is stored and it can be searched for.
The problem with an IRC conversation is that there is a very strong, and very real chance that the conversation (and hence the solution) is lost forever. At the end of the day, this benefits the person who had the problem initially, but nobody else can benefit from that knowledge once it is lost.
RE: Archive problems....
Log Chat Room
Although one solution to this would be to log the Chat room and make it searchable. Not easy, but indeed feasable.
Web site going offline
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