Charlie, IF people are using it, the minimizing arrow makes it fully transparent to me. I'd vote to leaving it in place, all things being equal. IT is of no negative consequence to me. Again, thanks for trying to always improve the trainboard experience. Joe
My one concern regarding the Shoutbox is the possible inability to moderate the content 24hrs a day. But other than that, it doesn't affect me either way. It is useful if there is someone on there that you want to ask a question that you need a quick answer to or discuss a certain topic with, without sending scores of PM's but from what I've seen so far, it's mostly general chit chat. On a more festive note: Matt and I wish everyone on TB a very merry Christmas and here's to a properous 2007.
I must not be as bright as I thought. I see the "Shoutbox" and I see the text scrolling by, but I dont see anyway to contribute..no place to enter text.
The enter text area is to the left of the "shout" button. Click inside that box and the cursor will appear.
I found it. I had enlarged the font size of the whole page so I could read it easier and somehow that squeezed the text box out of site.
There needs to be a way for it to be removed from the front page if we don't use it. Just makes for more scrolling and a generally crankier Brian... and you guys already think I'm bad enough! As for the moderated chat, I see exactly how well that took off. I was a chat moderator at RailroadForums for years and keeping to a topic, even just trains in general, was pretty much impossible. People will talk about what they want to talk about. You'll probably want to keep a baby-sitter by to make sure it doesn't get to real for the kiddies, but otherwise just let people do what they will.
Brian, I did not know we could minimize the sections on the front page until the chat came along. Now, I have it minimized using the small arrow as well as a few other topics that are not of general interest to me. So, because of Chat, my front page is now cleaner than before and there is nothing but a clean bar where the chat was. Net sum gain for me. Only had to minimize once, and it was done. Joe
Something must've been whack with my cookies then because when I first tried that it wouldn't stay closed; after I reloaded the page it opened again. Now it stays closed. Weird.
That's exactly right and this is the issue... Some of the people here obviously like to talk to each other in a real-time environment. This can foster friendships (or go the other way) and for a lot of folks be enjoyable. I think what we are testing now (Shoutbox) is not a long-term solution for our needs. Being able to provide this for those that want it would be a good thing, but keeping it from taking away from the other areas of the site and making sure it is not abused would be a larger issue. Charlie
Charlie, Since the feature can easily be bypassed, I have no problem with it staying on TrainBoard. Abuse might a problem in the future, but I think that most users of TB are here for info and sharing. Thanks to you and everyone at TrainBoard for all your work. Merry Christmas, Phil