The point I was trying to make is that of convenience.
For me, chatting on IRC is no problem as I have mIRC and KVIRC already installed... I also have MSM, ICQ and Yahoo, but I find they are far more distracting than IRC, thats why I dislike them... and the emphasis I put on that post was copied straight from Roberts, to try and highlight that statements like I HATE JAVA don't really help anyone... why do you hate Java? Is it that the problem is not Java but Microsofts flaky VM? Would Suns latest JRE fix the problems?
I'm not really a fan of Java either, but casting aside my personal views, you want to achieve more activity... I'm merely providing you with a solution... a solution that has been tried and tested by me... and perhaps most importantly... one that appears to work.
And why does it work? Convenience. Some people, no matter what you say, simply wil not go to the trouble of downloading, installing and registering a nick name just to chat. But if you give them a one (or two click) solution, they may just drop in and have a chinwag when they have five minutes.
As for making it fit the site design and tweaking it so you have total control... the Java client I was talking about is open source, runs quite happily in IE, Mozilla and Firefox... its only dislike it seems is the Microsoft VM (although I should say that of the 10+ people I know have tried the client, only 1 has had problems that required a new VM). But even that is fixable by non-techies (we had one guy struggling to get it going... gave him a link to latest JRE from Sun and five mins later he was on-line) It has a wealth of options and looks pretty smart right out of the box. In short, if it took 5 minutes (which is roughly what it took me to add it to our game site) and it increases utilisation of the channel... surely thats 5 minutes well spent.
How effective is it? We've been running our game for just over 2 weeks and in that time, we've held three creators hour chats... the first one, we had one new player turn up... the second one we had none and the third (with the in-game client) admittedly, we only had one new player in there, but then it went mad and from like 5pm Sunday, we didn't stop talking until nearly midnight. We had like 5 new players on and they were ALL using the in-game client. I know 5 doesn't sound like a lot, but that more than doubled the normal population of our channel. And now, if they want to chat, they can... with just two clicks of the mouse.
I can understand you want control WILL, but sometimes you have to be prepared to sacrifice a little to achieve the aims, and if getting more people on-line on IRC is the aim, then you can't be asking them to be installing messaging software, mirc, gaim... whatever... because quite simply, if they were prepared to do it, they would have done it and they would be chatting. You need to give them a simple, no fuss, no mess solution that takes them straight where you want them to go. The easiest way to do that right now is to use a third party Java IRC applet.. and seriously, five minutes work... isn't that at least worth a try? Of course the flipside to all of this is that maybe other people don't want to chat... its not everybodies cup of tea, so regardless of how much time and effort you put in, you may not get any extra people in there, so if you spend a lot of time writing your own and no one uses it... you'd be pretty miffed. Thats why giving a ready written client a whirl maybe a good starting point.
Just my $0.02.
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