As the inclusion of chatrooms has already been confirmed for the near future, the ability to stay in multiple rooms at once and switch with a simple click would be a great feature as well. Without being able to be in multiple rooms at once, you’d end up with a bunch of near-empty rooms thinning out the community to the point that people who are trying to start for the first time end up lost.
Having some two or three default chatrooms would be a nice start, maybe General Chat for people discussing whatever, so it doesn’t clutter up the space of people trying to work, and eterna Chat, specifically for discussing things relating to eterna.
Some other good defaults that you could include yourself on upon registration or changing your settings could be group chats and rooms for specific languages, so non-English speakers don’t have to deal with the frustration of trying to speak around so much chatter.
I also recommend not naming the chat tabs explicitly, and instead just doing something like having 8 chat tabs, each with a different color. If people wanted to split their conversation off of the main one, they could say, “let’s take this to yellow chat”?
Basically if you try to hardcode what each chat tab is for, you probably won’t correctly guess what the community needs, so this is a possible way around it. But yay for tabs!
This is a really good idea. We were also thinking we could automatically have chat rooms for each puzzle so you can divide up the discussion ( + group chat)
I’d worry about a chat for each puzzle – with ~200 people on at a time, that seems like way too many chats.
I’ve seen some video games with chats called things like “Korean 1, Spanish 1, German 1” but in the end the community decided what the rooms would be used for: Korean 1 became a chat for hardcore players and Spanish 1 was unused even by Spanish-speaking users.
I’m not sure what the right solution is, but if you can come up with a good way to let the community decide what the chat tabs / chat rooms will be, you can be guaranteed that you don’t have to change them again.
What about: Challenge newbie, Challenge Intermediate, Challenge Advanced, and corresponding groups regarding lab: Lab newbie, Lab Intermediate, Lab Advanced? Possibly with groups having their own chats (leaving loners like me out in the cold though )
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