Would be cool to have a Live Chat tab (available only to Premium Members IMO) with a fairly basic Chat system.  Single room would probably be more than enough at first, and may look a bit empty at times but would be fun when a few people got on at the same time, could even help with setting up quick games to play in a single sitting.  It would be nice if the Chat was kept even if you went into a game or around the site (and not in a separate window!). 

Anyhow, a some day nice-to-have suggestion.

so more like a sidebar for chat, rather than a 'tab'. Kongregate has something like this. theirs is per board, but ours could just be site-wide. it would be pretty nice.

nah, I don't like to IM

I'm with RB... having to talk to you people in real time? No wai!

While it may initially sound like a great idea, and I think it could be pretty nice to chat with most of you, pretty much every chat seems to devolve into chatting about sex or drugs. I know we tend toward a somewhat more mature crowd, but all it would take is a RuthlessG and ViktorVaughn to make the chat log something I would block or ignore. Not that I have anything against either of those guys personally, but their interests tend to be quite different from my own, and most of the time, not something I want to read/discuss.

Basically, for a chat log to be something useful to me, it must have an ignore person function.

Honestly, I would probably use it more as an in-game function rather than a site wide thing. I never jumped on the IM bandwagon back when it first became popular, mostly because of the above-mentioned reasons. It was always more annoying than anything else.

I could definitely see it being useful in something like the A&A tournament, where teammates could talk strategy in real-time and plan moves accordingly.

I guess what I am saying is that if this feature were available, I might use it once in a great while, but most of the time I would likely ignore it.

IM is pretty much my primary form of communication. I'm on the phone most of the day at work, so I hate using that for recreation, and I'm old enough to pre-date the texting frenzy. I land in the 5ish year window where IM was what there was.

I'm with EM, the only reason i can see using it is in a team game where we'd want to discuss real time strategy. otherwise, i spend too much time as it is on this and WF (games and forums) that another lengthy way of talking and as a distraction would be too much. i.e. wouldn't be all that useful.

i can see up side and down side for this chat idea. it would be good for anyone new to the site that has a question thay can type it in and get a responce right away. the down side is the spamer/A-hole side of it. but if tom gets a few chat monators who are able to limit or take away chat functions from people who abuse the chat rules then i think the chat idea is a good one. that said i think that it should go near the bottom of the to do list.

If anyone can recommend a decent open source PHP based chat server implementation then let me know, if I can add it in to the site easily then am happy to do that.

I've decided that I am a big fan of the Chat idea but not really for chatting but just so I can see who is on the site so if I wanna start a quick game I can see who is hanging around. Chat would be a nice way to do that so if you are interested in a game you can just login to the chat and we can start games from there.

Cool stuff happens over chat but the effort to set it up generally isn't worth it. Most implementations don't scale well or integrate well with existing code.

A simpler idea that gets you 90% of what you want for 10% of the work is to have the flash player ping the server for new chat messages when it's fetching the map data. I often forget to scroll down to see the chat before I make my move, so having the flash player say something as simple as "5 new messages since your last turn" would be useful. Or you could just do in Javascript and have a little box pop up right above the flash player.

As for what RiskyBack suggested, Tom, do you know if there's someway to use the code for the little dot that appears next to your name in the forums when you're online elsewhere on the site? Just having that dot show up generally would be useful. If you know someone is online, you can send him a PM saying "My IM screenname is blah -- talk to me there".

Sure, can do. Also maybe a 'Players online now' list? I was going to put it at the bottom of the forums front page for ease of reference.

Perfect, tom.

This doesn't work that well for people who leave themselves logged in. I suggest something along the lines of what Facebook has done with it's chatting system. You can turn on your chat, and if you do, you appear as on. If you don't , you don't appear as on. If you are inactive, you are notated as such, so even though you are on, you may not be ready to play a game. I also think being able to send one message to everybody would be nice instead of just private messaging... So instead of P2P, you have to press "I'm online" and your chat window opens with everybody else who is online. This way you can be on Wargear and not be on the list if you don't want to play, on the list if you do want to play, and on the idle list if you're on and not active. One big chat box, for everybody, is all you need since private messaging is already available.

Somehow I missed this the first time around.

I personally think a live chat sidebar would be cool. As Cram suggested, modeling it after Kong's would be great. "Ignore user" would obviously be a possibility, you could add moderators if you really thought it was necessary, and for me that leaves the only downside being adding another huge timesuck to how long I spend on this site.

I guess it wouldn't be all that "useful," as you guys point out, but it'd be neat. I think it would make a huge impact on fostering a sense of community to sit down and say "hey guys, what's up on WG" and be able to chat with whoever's around.

EDIT: It would also make it possible to arrange lightning games with more than 1 other player which is currently effectively impossible.

I like arranging lightning games, that aren't necessarily lightning games, just quick games that don't have to finish tonight. A quick casual game that can wait if somebody has to leave. You can also ask if anybody on is willing to test a DEV game or something or the sort.

tom wrote: If anyone can recommend a decent open source PHP based chat server implementation then let me know, if I can add it in to the site easily then am happy to do that.

Would something like this work?  https://blueimp.net/ajax/

I really just googled "open source PHP based chat server" and that was the first hit, but it looks nice if it could be embedded in the site... of course I have really no idea about this sort of thing so if I'm totally off then I'll just leave it as is on the back burner.  Still just one of those things I think may be nice for the community (even if it may have relatively few online at times currently).

Thanks!

Great find thanks Yertle - that's just the sort of thing I've been looking for. I'll take a look and see how easy it will be to integrate into the site.

I think having an area where players can easily find others to start games with would be really useful.

This is exciting.