Toss the 15 minutes of chat time out the window per public post. That's way too complex. Keep it simple.
As I was saying before, whether or not something's complex is really more of a Bob issue. And it wouldn't be complex really. If someone has posted 100 messages, they're alloted a total of 1500 minutes of chat. Easy.
But, that said, it was an off-the-cuff idea. Not one I'm married to.
It is similar in regards to private messages. We don't realize profit off of those (only 2 people see them), but they are an incentive to join the site.
The similarity ends when you factor in cost. PM's cost us nothing but the code it took to implement them. Okay, that can be equated with the cost of outright buying the DC package and bringing it in-house. But the cost of PM's ends there. Not so with DC. I don't remember -- are we paying an ongoing amount right now to have it available? If I remember correctly, we won't if we bring it in-house. But then comes the cost in terms of processor power and the possibility that it can slow down the rest of the site.
I would suspect (hope/dread) that the reason it's unreliable is that it's overwhelming their servers. I hope it's not that the software itself is just unreliable. I'm not interesting in shaky software any more than I'm interested in such software overwhelming or crashing my servers. Or having to buy another server and pay for its connection because it doesn't play well with others and exposes our bread and butter services to outages. I kinda dig the fact that our only real outages have been the brief timeframes when I've rebooted machines for one reason or another.
I want to realize some profit off of the DigiChat, but I don't want to make it too complicated.
If it's complicated, that's my problem. I wouldn't make it complicated for the users. Personally, I dont' mind a little work in the interest of profits. <g>
I'd be interested in the data mining results before I comment on it further.
Me, too, although I'm still a ways away from being able to implement anything like that. Unlikely to get it done before the cost of lifetime subscriptions gets raised at the end of February.
And if I do decide to make it a premium-only feature (the option I like best at this point), I want to make that decision soon enough to allow people plenty of time to decide whether it's worth the $50 cost of using it.
What it boils down to is that we're in the message board business; not the IRC one. Not if being in the IRC business means providing a free but expensive service like the existing IRC servers do.
I'll have to see if I can get enough of this other stuff off my plate to work on seeing what percentage of the users currently using chat are subscribers and what percentage *only* use chat.
I like it as an inducement to subscribe; not as an inducement to just register on the site.
