A Hybrid Between Chat and Message Boards?

qirtaiba asks: "Synchronous discussion software (in simple terms, chat) allows discussions to take place instantly and interactively, but asynchronous software (discussion boards, a la Slashdot) have the advantage that they allow people from different timezones to participate equally. Does anyone know of a hybrid? The closest thing I have found is a proprietary 'Commons Console' offered as a service by Conflict Lab. This is not just an idle question. The Internet Governance Forum (or IGF — you can find more information here) is meeting for the first time in Athens from October 30th to the 2nd of November, this year. A lot of people who might like to participate aren't going to be able to make it to Athens, so the IGF has asked for ideas on how best to enable remote participation. Can Slashdot help?"

Haha, nope.

Can Slashdot help?

Unlikely. You must be thinking of the other slashdot...

Take a squiz at Campfire

I've been using Campfire [campfirenow.com] as part of a group project. Initially I was against the idea.. but it's become useful, in that there's also logs of prior entries. About as close to a cross of chat and message board that's practical..

It's not the instantaneousness

It's the rate of buildup. The primary advantage of chatting is that replies are fast enough that they can in turn be replied to quickly, therefor allowing a dialog to made quickly. It's ideal for the "well, what about this" kinds of conversations. Message boards have their primary advantage in thoroughness. When you answer, you try and create complete answers that are useful to everyone reading it and aren't as specific. You do bring up an interesting point though, and it makes me think that it'd be neat to see a wiki that had chat built in. A permenant documentation with quickness in discussion.

Re:It's not the instantaneousness

Parlano's Mindalign [parlano.com] has sticky 'backchat' where recently joined users can scroll back and read the history of the conversation.

Mindalign is one of the major IM/collaboration players in the Investment Banking market, and is installed on the desktops of a lot of global banks.

(No, I don't work for Parlano)

-Jar.

Already done

Well, half way there. Would a system to store the relevant parts of a chat session for future reference [bash.org] do?

tag boards?

http://www.tag-board.com/ [tag-board.com] Tag boards have been around a while. Basically they are a chat window that refreshes every few seconds or so.

LysKOM?

How about good old LysKOM [wikipedia.org]? But maybe it's unheard of outside of Sweden/Finland?

Chat logs get you partway there

Many communities seem to get a lot of mileage out of publishing their chat history (e.g. public IRC logs).

This doesn't really solve the problem of equal participation for peers separated by timezone (or, more to the point, separated by waking hours), but it does address the following killer feature of message boards: searching past discussions for help. Public message boards often serve as organically-growing FAQs; for every question asked and answered, hundreds may get answers without ever having to ask. The same is true of published chat transcripts.

(It works in the corporate setting too: I've personally had good success, in terms of capturing ephemeral knowledge that would otherwise be lost, with behind-the-firewall publication of internal IRC logs.)

I like Slashdot

If it weren't for Slashdot management's draconian rules against page-views per day and 2 minute posting intervals, Slashdot would be a perfect example of an interactive chatroom that also serves as a web board.

Simple is best

Instead of straining yourself to figure out how to merge a chatroom with a message board, I'd recommend simply streamlining whatever message board configuration you're using for the fastest post/refresh rate you can get. The faster a user can post and refresh, the more simultaneous user connections your message board will be able to handle at one time.

The ideal way of doing this, is to make it so the user can post and get immediate results within a single mouse-click. Messages should be displayed in a linear fashion using a single page, rather than broken up into pages or nested by reply. A good example of such a setup is theFark.com [fark.com] website. Users can respond as quickly, or as slowly, as they like.

Just remember, any system that makes a user wait too long or makes it difficult for the user to find information will almost always fail in the end.

IRC?

With a screened IRC session people often reply to things said hours or days ago...

Chat == Forum

Chat is basically a non-threaded forum, running in real-time (which is to say it has lag below a certain treshhold).

The real difference is non-threaded forums (e.g. Bulletin Boards) vs. theaded forums such as NNTP or the slashdot comments.

If slashdot were refreshed every tenth of a second, it would be a threaded chatbox.

Now there _is_ a difference in how people communicate over chat vs. forums; chat typically contains a single sentence in each "post", whereas forum posts typically contain multiple sentences and even paragraphs. I'm willing to bet this behaviour stems purely from the (percieved) difference in lag; if you had a chatbox where messages would take longer to appear, people would probably start writing longer messages.

Metafoum - AJAX Forum Software

I am now using Blursoft's Metaforum [blursoft.com]

It works like phpBB or vBulletin but the active threads page, inside the thread itself and various other places are all built around Ajax so you get the realtime, non-refresh mode.

If someone posts the thread is bumped and everyone knows. In fact if you use FFx and move the forum to a background tab the tab blinks when a new post is there so you can go on with other work and only look when something has happened.

It's still beta but it's now quite usable. Plus... it has Ajax'ed Slashdot style moderation. Members can increase a post above the noise or sink it to oblivion. You set your floor with a fuzzy slider.

There is a working forum at http://www.planetblur.org/beta/index.php [planetblur.org] if you want to look.

what hybrid?

IRC is just a message board you update frequently. With RSS and AJAX, there is no longer any difference on that level. Take five minutes and get rails to make one for you.

The easy solution... both?

I don't enough (OK, anything) about the meeting and what the goals are, but here's an idea. Why not do both?

Run a message board during the conference, as well as before and after. Encourage people in the conference (planners, attendees) to post.

Then, have specific "chat times" where someone from the conference is available to chat with others. The purpose of this is to get many interested people involved at once. Nothing is more dull than a chat with four people when you expected forty or four hundred. After the chat is done, simply post the log in a thread in the forum. The main ideas can be continued at a more leisurely pace.

There's plenty of free bulletin boards available, and IRC always works for chat.

You probably want to spend the bulk of your time informing participants of these modes of communication (and ensuring participation of key members) than setting up a bunch of software.

ja.zz

The ja.zz system over at Shacknews [shacknews.com] is nice and seems exactly what you're looking for -- a system that supports multiple fast-moving topics.

There's also a more extensible clone of it used over at Stoofoo [stoofoo.net] (may be NWS).

Usenet news and/or email lists?

While usenet is basically a much better bbs-system then all the crappy web-based forums, with the speed posts traverse the path from poster, via server to reader -- it pretty much does everything you want.

Only problem is you'd have to implement a web-interface that translated bb-code to html to get anyone to use the thing these days.

I personally like mailing-lists with archives too -- but I suppose you'd want to opt-in on recieveing the archive for the past x days when you sign up as a new user.

I realize you really want something "snappier", such as a jabber-server with integrated web interface and chat-logging.

I think the main reason there's so many horrid web-forums is that a) it's dead easy to make one that works (not securly, but who cares about that, right?), and b) it's dead easy to get hosting for such a solution.

To deploy a *real* application server online, you generally need a different type of hosting environment than what most web-hosting companies provide.

Maybe we can hope that the growt of Virtual Servers (be it UML, xen, vmware or something else) in the low-end marked will allow people to start writing real programs again, as opposed to mutilated http-based stuff (You can scream about cookies and php-sessions all you want, but implementing a stateful app over a stateless protocol is going to be a pain, always).

Or; "Why is it that when you've got access to a webserver, everything starts to look like a http-request" ?

Altme

Try Altme (www.altme.com). It has chat, calendaring, file posting, access control, users/groups etc. You create user communities called worlds which you can add users to.

just an idea

It seems to me that the main difference between chat and board posting is the amount of thought that goes into a message. Both sometimes have single line " LOL" comments and longer well thought out monologs, but chat tends towards shorter punch lines and sites like Slashdot tend to monologs.

I think the most basic thing you would need is a chat interface with 2 "Send" buttons. One would just transmit a "throw away" line to everyone who is viewing live, and the other would be a "for posterity" button that would actually post the comment. That would allow people to interact with the live community, but also prevent people from having to sift through tons of junk to get to the actual conversation.

If anyone actually does this based on my idea I want my name in there somewhere and a winter home in the Bahamas.

Citadel

Citadel might be overkill for what your are wanting. http://www.citadel.org/ [citadel.org]

keep in mind percieved differences

I'm not sure if I understand why you'd need a hybrid of the two. it seems that threaded discussions in the form of a message-board system should work relatively well if some ground rules were set up initially (like... private messages go in a new forum thread, or a system of PM-emails on the forum site was a part of the system)

Keep in mind that generally now, IMs are thought of as more 'disposable', and people write one or two sentence posts (as mentioned above) quite often. in informal discussions, the majority are pretty empty 'hahah' or 'lol' types of things.

additionally, people who are used to this culture of 'fast, short messages' in chat will be a little thrown off if you then ask people to post thoughtful and insightful messages via a chat medium. longer messages take time to read, and the constant automatic scrolling of text as messages come in will be really frustrating to participants.

Besides the advantage of easier readibility due to NOT having automatically scrolling text like in a chat system, an advantage to using a more "lagged" system or "asynchronous" system is the perception of more permanence to the messages. people will generally put more thought into their replies, and people used to the cultural difference between IM and forums won't be annoyed when a person sends a couple paragraphs in what most see as a disposable chat medium. forums "look" like websites, so the content in the forum looks/feels more permanent. EVERYONE can read it, even long after it's posted if the forum itself is kept visible. Even if it's disclosed early on that all forum messages will be deleted after the discussion, there's still the perception of permanence because it's on a solid "static" webpage.

so, technically yes, chat is a non-threaded forum, but there are differences in perception and the effect of those differences that could have a big impact on the quality of discussion by participants.

Just some stuff to think about.

IRC + forum linked by a bot

A community [tasvideos.org] I am involved with uses a forum and an IRC channel. The hook in between is a bot created by the main administrator. Whenever there is a post on the forum, the bot announces it on the IRC channel, with a very convenient link. Not sure if it's what original poster had in mind but I think it's a neat system.

FuckedCompany's BBS was practically a hybrid...

Although it was a BBS, users would respond to threaded topics so frequently that you would have real time conversations with people on several topics at a time. I would find myself hanging around the site for an hour or two having discusions in multiple topics. I would read one, make responses, then read the next. By the time I got back to the first one, there were usually multiple replies. Within even just a few minutes I could have had several exchanges with the same person. The drawback to this was that once a topic fell off the main page it was usually no longer discussed (out of sight, out of mind), with the exception of a few topics that would go on to have thousands of replies. Some topics were also brought back, especially when using what somebody said in a previous topic to throw back at them if they are caught doing a 180 on the same topic later.

php/mysql

i wrote a web based "chat room". it used php/mysql. you login to it (no registration at this time), and you see the last so many lines posted. It uses 2 iframes (one for the html form post window, one for the refreshing chat).

You get to see what the previous people said (esp if they were having a conversation) or you can just make notes to everyone about whatever.

it's actually a really small program .. not too hard to do.

Re:CAM

I'd just like to mention this is my post, had login trouble. If you are interested in contacting me I am willing to discuss the event with you. You can get a lot of mileage out of a small amount of network functionality, so I'd be interested to hear more about your project and see what would fit into your event. Do you even have network connectivity? Can you stream video out or do you have lots of students who could type at high speed to summarize what's going on? Etc. Good luck!

Matt