Devshed Chat

What about a Devshed Chat? Something like IRC or just a Java applet. A place for overworked and underpaid programmers and sysadmins to come in and shoot the ****.

Lol, just use YaHoo!. Voice chat and all... I would chat, just would here my kids in the background.

Oh my, live debates. That might be too much to handle.....

ACK. The forum threads are consuming more than enough time, so probably few people would often chat. And when it is necessary to communicate in private, there are the PMs. (And, of course, a real-time chat can never reach the richness of opinions and arguments found in a forum, simply because there is never enough time to type sufficiently complex stuff into a one-line edit box. And once there is a chat, newbies (especially the type of scriptkiddie who can't even use a scripting language properly but is 31337 due to the possession of a w4r5crip7) _will_ go there and ask questions - which will either mean that people send answers to a unarchived medium and have to type the answers every time again (and never as precise as in a forum) or that the most-heard phrase will be "RT*M".)

As for developers chatting ... maybe it would work, but imho people will rather be here than in a chat.

no, i dont think there should be one. my reasons are the same as nowhereman's.

I'm in for no, too. I don't think it would hurt anything, but I know I wouldn't use it.

Oh, just for the record, I voted no also...

I think it'd be kind of nice to get into some real time development chats and maybe even some off topic stuff.

Yeah, it'd be abused by newbies, probably. But it's simple to tell them to just post their question and we'll get to it.

---John Holmes...

Well... I just wrote a Python-based server and Flash-based client for an XML-based messaging protocol of my own devising (for fun).

I suppose we could use it for the chat (if we really would like it) - don't want to use what everyone else is using, do we?

I'll talk to the higher-ups if we get a majority of positive votes on this.

You should just load it up. I think that once it's here, people will get into it.

---John Holmes...

You know, this might not be a bad idea - I just seen this sort of thing for members of the VB community on their add-on site. They had the regular forums and a live chat forum. Don't think it was for all members of the community, but there was alot of people in the real time chat when I was browsing their forum......