I am wondering are there any plans in the future where people can discuss in real time the subjects here on this website? I think it would be nice if we could chat and have message boards to communicate with on this amazing educational forum.
A resounding "No!" to a chat room I, for one, certainly hope we never do. Chat rooms, generally, tend to suck and just contribute to stress levels. Answers here are sometimes complex and require more than the sentence-or-two types of responses typical of chat rooms. When that's the case, a forum is always better. Near-real time conversations may be had here -- and often are -- when two people happen to be in the same forum at the same time and are posting back and forth. The only advantage a chat room has over that is that the chat room program shows each participant's posting as it happens without the viewer doing anything (touching the keyboard or mouse, etc.); and here one would have to keep refreshing the screen manually to see if anything new had been posted. But I, for one, have been in near-real time conversations here several times. It's not "chat," per se, but it's as okay as we need for it to be around here. Finally, chat rooms often cause more arguing back and forth because it's so immediate and easy to make a posting. People tend to shoot first and think about it later. We get enough of that around here already.
It was just an idea. There are so many nice people here who are mature and intelligent. I thought it would be nice to chat with the fine people here from time to time about education or other things. However, I like the message boards here. I find them informative where you can search in the archives for answers you need whereas you could never get that with a chatroom. And I agree that chatrooms can cause stress with troublemakers. So there are plus and minuses noted. It was nice to hear opinions about this- thank you. cb3
