Are Forum Chat Rooms a Good Idea?
Forum Chat Rooms, sometimes referred to as “shout boxes” are features that enable real time text messaging communication via a defined set of allowed permissions between two or more forum users. Forum Chat Rooms can be great features if they “add-to” your overall forum’s performance. If the Forum Chat Room feature that you wish to install will benefit not just the activity of the forum, but also caters to your forum’s niche category and appeals to your registered user’s and casual guest users then installing a Forum Chat Room feature may improve both the user generate content of your forum along with improving your web domain’s SEO (search engine optimization), page rank score, impressions, and page views. In this brief article, we will be discussing a variety of methodological pro’s and con’s regarding the beneficial usage of the much sought after forum feature known as the, Forum Chat Room.
ACTIVITY
If the Forum Chat Room will bring in, attract, and keep your forum activity going by improving the overall page views and impressions of your forum pages as a whole, then keeping the Forum Chat Room may be a good idea. However if the Forum Chat Room has decreased the number of forum users who would otherwise have created topics in categories or responded to the already created topics, then removing or not even installing the Forum Chat Room might be the better route to go. Occasionally one forum administrator, owner, or employed forum staff member may see one forum that utilizes a Forum Chat Room effectively and may want to have a similar feature on their forum. However that other forum may already and odds are does, have the activity level to utilize such a feature as a Forum Chat Room. Installing a Forum Chat Room for the sole purpose of “because” is not the route to go, especially if the Forum Chat Room feature installation will decrease or even diminish your already slow or steady forum activity. A forum that has a Forum Chat Room installed but with little to no forum activity looks a lot less appealing to a guest user versus a forum that doesn’t have a Forum Chat Room but is blistering with forum activity and an active user member base.
NICHE
If your forum niche is a type of category that specializes in a popular topic, then installing a Forum Chat Room feature may improve the overall appeal and stylish content to potential new members. A few popular forum niche’s that could potentially succeed even further are general discussion forums, web master forums, and media technology forums. There are many general discussion forums which have successfully introduced a Forum Chat Room feature and managed to not only keep a steady activity stream of content, but have even increased in user generated content by installing the Forum Chat Room feature at the right time. Web master forums or even promotion and admin-based forum niche’s will already have users that are familiar with such features as Forum Chat Rooms. So by installing a Forum Chat Room feature on a web master forum niche you would allow other like minded web master’s and forum owner’s discuss web master, promotion, and admin topics at a brisk rate rather than the usual topic and reply discussion format. Media and technology based forum niche’s that cover topics such as video games, popular movies, television series, and electronic gadgets will usually have a dedicated user base who live off of content and member engaging features such as Forum Chat Rooms. Forum niche’s that have a live radio broadcast may benefit from a Forum Chat Room feature by allowing the listening or tuned-in radio user’s to participate in a faster based content discussion via the Forum Chat Room feature rather than creating a topic in a forum category, waiting for another user to reply to the topic, but not before having to reload or refresh the web page on a constant basis.
PERMISSION BASED
If you decide to install a Forum Chat Room feature you may want to consider what type of usergroup gets to have the correct forum permissions to be able to use certain functions of the Forum Chat Room feature. Some forum owners may decide that they only want their employed staff members to have accessed permission to the Forum Chat Room feature. While other forum admins may open up the entire Forum Chat Room feature to not only registered members and employed staff team members but also to casual browsing guests who are not even a registered user of the forum. A good first starter permission methodology to utilize regarding a Forum Chat Room feature is to have only employed staff members and high valued content contributing members to have permission to access the Forum Chat Room feature. Though the employed staff team members of a forum will need to have more permissions than non-staff team members to use Forum Chat Room feature tools such as anti-spam and content moderation controls. A Forum Chat Room feature that has a full fledged list of spam and content moderation controls and control panels is a good first step to look for in a potential Forum Chat Room feature that you as the forum owner are considering to install.
Discussion Topic: Are Forum Chat Rooms a Good Idea?
