The few times I have visited the chat rooms they seem very devoid of participation. Is something needed to enhance or entice membership to participate?

Flyguy: Must be the time of day you're there! I usually check in around 9pm and almost always find someone there. There are about 15-20 of us who visit very frequently, though not every day.

For a few weeks ago I was in the chat room on a daily basis often around 4 pm et and I found almost always someone there. Since its a 6 hours time difference I have never been on the room after 6 pm so I cant judge if there is alot of people there after 6 pm.

I too asked this question some time ago and was given good advice:

when logging on to FT...also log onto chat and check it every now and then....

Dorian



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Dorian's Star Alliance RTW Price Chart: http://www.informationlab.com/rtw.htm
Blondebomber's Star Alliance Comparison Chart: http://members.home.net/deercroft/starall00.html

When you want to chat, I encourage you to keep the chat window open while surfing the web or doing whatever else you'd be doing (as long as your pc will support multiple windows at once) and check back at the window every several mins. Let's look at example:

4:41: FlyerTalker 1 enters, but seeing no one there, leaves

4:43: FlyerTalker 2 enters, but seeing no one there, leaves

4:45: FlyerTalker 3 enters, but seeing no one there, leaves

Let's look at what would happen if every followed above guidance:

4:41:FlyerTalker 1 enters, although seeing now one there, decides to wait a few mins

4:43: FlyerTalker 2 enters and is glad to see FT 1

4:45: FlyerTalker 3 enters and now it is a party!

And keeping chat minimized is SUPPOSED to give you an audible cue when someone enters he chat room or enters a comment.. however sound hasn't worked for me in months and I can't get anyone at FT to get digichat to address it...

My only commentary on this would be that the chat client needs to scale better for the number of people who use it on something like the recent bizjet survey chat.

It obviously couldn't hold up under the weight being put on it by 100+ FT'ers, but for an event like that it certainly needs to be able to.

JD

That's the problem with Java-based chat clients -- the flexability isn't there (at least from all the clients I've ever seen).

A Solution: Somebody from FT needs to register an IRC (internet relay chat) channel. It will require all participants in a chat to have a separate IRC client program such as mIRC, but the benefits are huge in comparison to java.

And if you've used IRC before, you've probably seen channels with 200, 300 or more people in them. At that size, any chat venue can get a bit nutty if all participants are active, but it can still be highly efficient and it's certainly a better environment than you'll find with java.

Just my $0.02.

Elektrik

Some good feedback here. There are several issues that I feel I need to address so I'll see if I can take them in order:

1. Speaking to the issue of "sound" in our chat area I have only heard feedback from 2 people in the FT Community that there was a problem with the sound in our chat area and I started acting on the first persons request as soon as I heard about it. Certainly we haven't been experienceing problems with the sound on our end and so it was a little bit of a problem to pin down. I mention this to let you know that we have heard you and that we are in close collaboration with DigiChat on this issue. My latest communication with DigiChat yielded the following:

==============================
Dear Michael,

I am glad to hear you were able to get it all up and working. Unfortunately with 3.0 the sounds are still disabled in Windows internet browsers. You have my word that our developers are hard at work trying to resolve this matter. If there is anything else I can do for you or you have any questions please let me know.

Sincerely,

Kurt
-------------------------------------------------------
DigiChat Support 1034 SW 57th Street
Digi-Net Technologies Gainesville, FL 32605 http://www.digichat.com (352) 333-3160
mailto:[email protected] FAX (352) 373-2690
==============================

2. As for the "scalability" of DigiChat I'm a little unclear as to why a couple of you think that DigiChat doesn't scale well as the problems we experienced during the "Use Your Miles" chat had very little, if anything, to do with the issues of scalability. The issues that night were due, in the main, to an unannounced upgrade to the product by DigiChat. Given these facts I feel that the chat client itself performed admirably even though some may argue that we did not.

3. It is true that JAVA has some problems but they tend to be mainly centered around issues of speed and portability. The suggestion of an IRC channel is a great idea and one that we had already considered. We opted for a browser based chat client because survey had shown that far too many people felt that downloading, setting up, and learning to use a whole new piece of software would be far too intimidating and probably not worth the effort and so we opted to make everybodys experience on FlyerTalk Live! as painless as possible...of course it's debatable if we succeeded or not but I feel we've provided a fairly good solution given the intitial conditions. The "Use Your Miles" chat was pretty much the only truely unsatisfactory night we've had and the chats are generally very productive.

I'd like to thank you all again for your feedback an would like to hear anything further you have to say about the situation. Comments? Criticisms? Suggestions?

Thank you all very much for your support.


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ThanX...
Michael at WebFlyer



[This message has been edited by Michael at WebFlyer (edited 10-03-2000).]