The Chat Box/Shout Box/TagBoard

I personally have a c-box and I don't think it takes any activity away from my forum. I use it as a way of just chatting to my members, and of maybe getting quick questions out of the way. Sometimes I've had guests post a comment about the board, and I can persuade them to join. Plus it shows guests taht the admin/members have a sense of humour, and are willing to joke around. Being the admin, sometimes people feel you don't want to goof off, as you're normally the one enforcing the rules and posting 'proper' information. And despite me trying to 'be a regular member' I still have that ADMIN title stamped on me. So I love my c-box, purely because I feel like taht regular joe who can goof off.

This is all from personal opinions and experiences, I'm not sure how right or wrong it is.

Hi,

Please direct all questions to this forum:

support.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=support

These threads are for discussion and not getting help on your forum.

For me it's either way, but I don't really appreciate them on my board because when I first opened it, there were no posts for a long time--but the CBox had been in use for almost the entire period of time >.< I removed it and the forum became active.

I have a C-Box on my site, but it's suppossed to be there mainly for talking to people while you're trying to type in a long RP on another area of the site. However, I had to hide it unless you log in, because spambots and spamming guests love those things. I've had some spamming issues from guests on it, so it can be a plus AND a minus, unless you take certain precautions. Yes, it does tend to take away from your forum activity, and I've felt compelled to remove it a couple of times, but I also fear that would also drive the people away if they didn't want to post.

I like to use the C-box simply because i've got tons of people trying to figure out what the forums about and to ask a few quick questions that they could't expect to get a quick enough response in from the general boards or a PM. I've had guests really appreaciate the help i've given them and they even ended up joining. As for spamming, that has never happened to me. NOT ONCE! which is amazing, i've never gotten any spammers or anyone trying to screw up the order that i've established on my board. For me C-Box works well and is provides a way to chat while someone is typing up a post for their RP posts

I've been on sites with cboxes and sites without them. The two RP sites I'm currently active on both have cboxes, and I think they are very handy for seeing who's online (who's actually active, I mean; as opposed to people who aren't actually online anymore but whose names still show up in the online list because they've been gone less than 10 minutes). They're also good for quickly finding people to RP with, in my experience, or for quick messages about when you'll be gone or when you'll be back. On those RP forums, the cboxes haven't detracted from the board activity at all; they've actually helped me get more involved in the community as a whole, so overall I definitely prefer sites with cboxes.

However, on my personal site, where I'm the actual admin, we do not have a cbox. It's not an RP site, just a chat site/fan forum. So since it's just a normal discussion board, in this case I feel that having a cbox would detract from the board activity. In addition to that, for a while there were a few members who were really good at...let's say, pushing each other's buttons. My staff members and I couldn't guarantee that there would always be someone online to make sure things wouldn't get out of hand; we couldn't even prevent that from happening occasionally in the forum itself, so I can't imagine what it might have been like with a cbox or chatroom. Thankfully, there isn't much of that kind of drama anymore; but the overall activity level has also gone down pretty drastically since the board opened (3 1/2 years ago), so I don't think putting in a cbox would make any sense now.