Quote Originally Posted by Colin View Post
i think a live chat system for a forum is a very bad idea .... it simply defeats the point of a forum - the point being that answers can be searched and found from the site and search engines - live chat can not, which means people repeat the same questions/answers over and over, and in the future when no one posts useful information - knowledge is lost....
That is partialy true. But when you see that pepole are asking the same questions over and over again then you know what interests pepole the most. So we can use this information for instance to go and prepare some useful tutorials wich would provide answers to theese questions.
Many other sites and different comunities use similar aproach. The difference is that most of them use IRC chating system.

Also live chating with other pepole can easily point you in the right direction.
I remember the time when I was live chating with one of my friends (a begginer programer) with the use of Windows Live Messenger. As a newbe programer he usualy didn't even know how to properly adress a problem and therefore didn't even know how to properly ask for help. He only knew what he likes to do but had no idea of how to do this. So many times I helped him just by pointing him to search for right topics.
And do you know how we became friends? He was posting his questions on Delphi-si fomunity forum but becouse his questions were poorly defined he didn't get any useful answers to them. So one day when I was trying to answer on of his topics (we exchanged a lot of post in just one day) I asked him to use Messenger instead. And with that I gave him an opurtunity to actualy explain me what exacly he wanted to do. So now I was able to point him in the right direction for solving his problem. And a few days later he solved his problem almost on his own by using the documentation and various articles that I pointed him to.

If we want to improve Pascal Game Development Comunity we must at first make it newbe friendly. I don't mean for a newbe programes but for newbe game designers. Why? Most newbe game designers won't know how to ask question in the right way for us to easily find the soulution to their problems just as it was with my friend. And I belive that Chat system can help a lot on this area but it would require more active participation from the comunity. If there is noone online then it doesn't serve its purpose.

I also found a workaround for AJAX Chatbox frequent logouts. When you are loging into a PGD forum you must chek RememberMe checkbox. This creates a permament sesion and thus doesn't log you out from checkbox after some time of inactivity (forum browsing inactivity, activity in Chatbox doesn't count). Last time I was able to stay loged into the chat system for about three hours this way (noone else was present at that time).