Is there a chat element to this board? I would guess the massive volume of posters would make a chatbox unviable, but hey - if ya don’t ask, ya dunno.
There has not been an official Straight Dope chat since we migrated from AOL 12 years ago. There was an unofficial IRC channel but even that hardly gets any use now. I guess we just prefer meeting face to face for such things.
Some of the spin-off boards have chat clients. The usage varies. I’m not sure the admins want links to these those so I leave it to them to say if they can be provided.
We could, theoretically, but that tends to get us labeled as a social board, which means more workplaces will block us. Since a huge proportion of our members read/post from work, that would not be a good thing.
So, no plans to do so.
Of course, the various spin off boards have an incredibly small population, so a spin-off’s chat function is not any kind of fill in for a Dope chat. Not even worth mentioning, really.
As twixter suggests, I believe one of the splinter boards chat basically got it flagged and banned at various workplaces as a “social” site. Mellophant, I think? They also apparently had a problem with people putting up gay porn images, making “real time” moderation* important.
Doesn’t sound like it’s worth the pain or trouble to have one here.
*eta: though now that I think about it, I think it was a moderator doing it in the first place, so I guess it was more a lack of rules than moderating.
Fair enough. Thanks.
No, that was DoMeBo that ran into those issues. Mellophant is a much smaller board that is mostly MB based RPGs at this point with ties to Domebo.
With ties to Dombo? You mean Domebo changed it’s name to Mellophant don’t you?
Anyhow, I don’t think the OP here was looking for a MB based RPG chat that just happened to have a couple of former Dopers, so I guess the point is moot. Apologies for the misunderstanding.
There used to be an IRC #straightdope room that was quite active for several years. It died out, oh, 5 or 6 years ago. I used to hang out there a lot, back when I had no life. Once I left, well, there just wasn’t any reason for anyone else to show up, you know?
Well, it would be good for our productivity. But not for our collective state of mind.
#straightdope came back for a weekend or thereabouts recently. (That’s the only way I’d know about it, anyway!) Might be fun to do that again, actually.