Sounds like a cool idea. I think that if it's there, then people will use it. If I were you guys though, if it were to cost money, I wouldn't bother. Just because it isn't really needed, it'd just be an added extra kinda thing.
I like the shoutbox idea... it's free. Also, as far as I know, an IRC-chat would open separately? Didn't we have one of those? It wasn't very popular. However, a shoutbox at the top of the boards isn't a bad idea. It might even be more random than random chat. And still, the whole conversations will still be in Random. The shoutbox can be like the LPA's Twitter
I think its a good idea, I like the one over on lplive. *cough* Now if Derek just doesn't ask me for 2003 audio I will be happy =) hehehe *cough*
Ok we'll test the shoutbox idea soon. Just remember, were not doing this to copy another site but because our members asked for it.
Question, do you think it would look better at the top of the forum page? I'm not sure if it will get noticed down at the bottom.
+1 for IRC, if anyone cares. But shoutbox should be interesting. I'm not sure if it'd work or not, but let's see.
I understand that not being around (and being a douche bag) for nigh on five-plus months negates my opinion, but it wouldn't cost any money to run a channel on IRC. All you'd have to do is post a link to the server and channel and that's it. You could even set up a bot (it'd have to be on someone's computer that's on all the time) to maintain the channel.
Logging onto the forum is a bitch on a mobile because of the shoutbox. I get an error message every 5 seconds.
Try going to wap.lpassociation.com to use the mobile forum skin, it doesn't have the shoutbox. The shoutbox doesn't play nicely with my iPhone either.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who was thinking wtf at supposed server costs. I'll more than likely be rather active in IRC, so I could help with keeping people in line. Also, for the shoutbox, relative timestamps would be nice.
We'd prefer to have our own IRC server rather than piggy back off something else so we can have complete control of it, and that would cost extra as our current host doesn't allow running IRC on our dedicated server.
I have my own server/website that has tons of bandwith and space. I don't know if I can run an IRC server, if I can I would be willing to supply that being run on there, but I don't think it can, because it's not a dedicated server, it's meant for running websites and stuff I am pretty sure. But like I said, I don't know. My monthly bandwith is 6500000 MB (Or 6TB I guess)
Observation I made in the shoutbox: Admin names and regular user names look almost identical. You can tell them apart on forum posts because of the bold vs. normal fonts (and the banners, obviously), but that doesn't really translate to the shoutbox, so they come out looking the same for the most part. It's confusing enough that it made me go "Wait, when did _cam_ become a staff member?" for a second.