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[Suggestion] Implement Live Chat on BHW - It's the missing golden feature

Live Chat Board Implemented on BHW

  • Yes - it would be a nice feature

  • No - I don't like it

Results are only viewable after voting.
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BassTrackerBoats said:
They would have to go through the same vetting process which is a process that takes a lot of time and very few qualify.
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Well under the current rules that may be true. I think though with this suggestion there would have to be modification of rules to fit the circumstances. Giving minor powers like 15 minute silences is not too easily abused. If it was an actual mod could step in when available. They could just be "power users" or some other title.

All they would be doing it making sure there is no one advertising in the chat (since that would be a rule I would assume) and bots handle the rest. Throwing out some silences and/or other minor chat room powers only temporary in nature would likely not require the same vetting process from a business reputation and security perspective.

I understand you cannot change the rules but you apply them but it is a suggestion thread so we can suggest how perhaps the rules could be changed to suit a chat channel. If the suggestion to add a chat channel is rejected that is fine but hey if we keep making suggestions maybe one day we hit a good one that is accepted.
 
Ravzar said:
If the suggestion to add a chat channel is rejected that is fine but hey if we keep making suggestions maybe one day we hit a good one that is accepted.
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And we (the staff) really appreciate the suggestions as that is one way to improve the forum.

It is not unusual for a forum suggestion from a member to develop into a discussion in the Mod forum and for that suggestion to be implemented in one form or another.
 
just my 2 pence .

years ago there was a voice application used on here, didnt work so was tacken away .

damian the owner sends us news letters of the best post and there brilliant .

i want to say maybe them threads look lame to advance marketers, but begineers love them lame posts , some even pro's look at them to recap info.

my penny worth!

chat might spoil everythink , how can it be monitored , scary ask me more scams.
 
yakuzaemme said:
I'm a sucker for data, so I wrote a quick little script to scan a few subforums.

Here are the results:
BlackHat Lounge: 269 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
BlackHat SEO: 290 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
Blackhat SEO Tools: 292 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
Proxies: 323 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
Facebook: 320 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
Instagram: 256 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
Pinterest: 304 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
Web Hosting: 281 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
White Hat SEO: 301 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
Cryptocurrency: 198 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages
Making Money: 234 of 400 threads has less than 2 pages

Pretty interesting.
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^ I am reposting this. Those stats are REALLY interesting to me. Over 50% of all the threads gets less than 10 replies.

I am therefore not agreeing on the whole 'users search to find answers'. Nothing in the content-side will change, just that the average threads will be longer, easier to find the discussions and answers you're looking for and much more tidy. The threads that right now spark no real conversation will just be moved to the chat.


Sephrata said:
Moderation will be your problem if it's open to the entire forum because a chat room would require real-time moderation.

Although there are quite a number of BHW moderators, many of them are not active (some have not been active for over a year).
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I don't agree - with clear rules, enough rooms and a great community (as BHW is already), we should be fine. There's Discords that has way more active users that are very clean and tidy.

BBulldog said:
2. Dragging people away from the forum (even if it's on the forum) - The point of the forum is that what you ask (and others answer) stays here forever. You may think there are a lot of repetitive threads, but a lot of people do use the search function and get their answer that way. Imagine if people started answering through live chat, the forum would slowly start dying.
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Please see above. I really don't think the forum itself will lose any value - if anything it would become even better. Each thread would contain of much higher quality, everything more concentrated, average session duration for users would increase thus increasing chances of posting more.
 
yakuzaemme said:
I don't agree - with clear rules, enough rooms and a great community (as BHW is already), we should be fine. There's Discords that has way more active users that are very clean and tidy.
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There are occasions when I report things like spam on here and 12 hours later, it's still waiting to be dealt with. I even have to sometimes flag things up with staff on Skype etc.

In a chat room, you would constantly need someone moderating 24/7 and even then you probably wouldn't have the same automatic safeguards in place as on here.

I think if a chat room happens, it would need to be for paid up members.
 
yakuzaemme said:
I've spent 2 hours researching this. PLEASE - make sure you read it all before leaving your comment(s).

BlackHatWorld is great. There's thousands of super talented people on here. The reason why BHW is considered the #1 IM forum by many is because of the extremely in-depth discussions that takes place, how well-moderated it is and how open members are about sharing 'secrets'.

There's one problem though:

BlackHatWorld, in it's current form, is designed to be a forum for discussions. And the current BHW content is not that.

The homepage is filled with 'junk'. What I mean by that is questions that doesn't spark any discussion.

Example of threads I see filling the homepage right now:

Please note that ^ those are all displayed at the same time. I would qualify them as genuine questions deserving of an answer - but it's not a topic for discussion the entire forum (or an entire subforum) would benefit of.



Let's imagine I am totally new to BlackHatWorld, and I want to learn more about Instagram Social Marketing.

I head to the subforum Social Media > Instagram.
The threads I see are these:


Again - all valid questions. But do they open up for a big discussion for the big majority to learn from? No.
Could they be answered with 1 reply, and is mostly only benefitial for the OP? Yup.


- - - - - - - - -

So, what am I suggesting?

Implement a live chat board. This will open up for much, much faster communicating between members of the forum.

This will open up for quick replies. Questions like "What panel works right now" could be answered quickly, and leave no footprint 3 months later.

I've done some digging, and found that CometChat works really well with XenForo (the platform BHW uses).


How would BHW (as a business) benefit from it?

1. Increase quality of the threads on the forum drastically
2. Increase time spent per user on website drastically

What features does CometChat have, apart from chat board?

1. Different roles (Moderator, Jr. Vip, Normal Member etc)
2. Automatically logged in as your forum user (with avatar, username etc)
3. Ability to kick/ban users from livechat
4. Word filtering
5. User can report conversations or messages
6. Admin can add advertisements (for example UnGagged)
7. Desktop and mobile push notifications (this is a big one!)


- - - - - - - - - - -

I truly believe this CAN be something that will do wonders for the forum.

It will become a direct competitor to the thousands of Discord/Slack channels for internet marketing - and will have best of two worlds (in-depth discussions in forum format - and chatting ability), which can bring massive traffic and new members to the forum.

It would become a much more respected forum as it would be clean of the 'junk' threads - which can bring even more talented people, more advertisers and a cleaner brand.


I hope this gets considered, and hope that I'm not the only one feeling that it would be an amazing feature that could only benefit both the members and the forum itself.

Thanks for your consideration,
Emil
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I got to say it sounds nice. A lot to learn on them I guess. I kinda look forward to it.
 
Sephrata said:
There are occasions when I report things like spam on here and 12 hours later, it's still waiting to be dealt with. I even have to sometimes flag things up with staff on Skype etc.

In a chat room, you would constantly need someone moderating 24/7 and even then you probably wouldn't have the same automatic safeguards in place as on here.

I think if a chat room happens, it would need to be for paid up members.
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It definitely is a possiblity.

I think a sound way to start would be to Jr. Vips only, to find the right balance between rooms, rules and order.

When ready, open it up to members with X amount of posts, and see how that plays out.
 
yakuzaemme said:
I think a sound way to start would be to Jr. Vips only, to find the right balance between rooms, rules and order.

When ready, open it up to members with X amount of posts, and see how that plays out.
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Except that if you restrict the chat to reputable members/jr.vips/[what ever member restrictions you want], you lose your main point that was moving away repetitive newbie questions to the chat. If newbies don't have access to the chat well...

I agree on the moderation part. Finding a solid, durable solution to moderate a live chat is the real issue here.
 
Sheepp said:
Except that if you restrict the chat to reputable members/jr.vips/[what ever member restrictions you want], you lose your main point that was moving away repetitive newbie questions to the chat. If newbies don't have access to the chat well...

I agree on the moderation part. Finding a solid, durable solution to moderate a live chat is the real issue here.
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Eventually, open it up to the general public. My point is that if you push ALL new users to a brand new format at day 1, havoc is bound to happen.

If you instead gracefully move over users, for example;

1) Start moving over Jr. Vips - see how that plays out. Optimize rules, rooms and structure
2) Start moving over members with 500+ posts - see if it works, if stricter rules are needed
3) Bring over members with 100+ posts - test the strength of the framework put in place
4) Bring over all members

It's a long process if wanting to be done right, but else chaos is bound to happen.
 
Good idea, Reddit for example also added live chat functionality in the form of Reddit Chat enabling real time discussions.
As sometimes the same questions are asked repeatedly, and the search function isn't always utilized, an incentive to use the live chat (while regulated) such as those described in the OP could really enrich the forum.
Also looking forward to hearing more thoughts on this.
 
BassTrackerBoats said:
And we (the staff) really appreciate the suggestions as that is one way to improve the forum.

It is not unusual for a forum suggestion from a member to develop into a discussion in the Mod forum and for that suggestion to be implemented in one form or another.
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It would be super interesting to hear your / other mods thoughts on this, as there's nobody more experienced of the forum than you guys.

I totally understand if there's things blocking this from ever becoming a reality, but would those reasons be open for the public, so perhaps we can think of an alternative or a possible solution?
 
yakuzaemme said:
It would be super interesting to hear your / other mods thoughts on this, as there's nobody more experienced of the forum than you guys.

I totally understand if there's things blocking this from ever becoming a reality, but would those reasons be open for the public, so perhaps we can think of an alternative or a possible solution?
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I don't see how it could be properly moderated, Emil, and that would be my main concern.

As to the techie stuff that can probably be handled by the BHW technicians but the day to day would be problematic without a lot more staff and some staff charged with that alone.

Personally I don't see it as a need or even a benefit as I rarely use any of the instant messenger/chat tools for anything other than very few things.

I have a couple of the staff on Skype and a few others but I don't use it usually.

Of course I'm a little older than the average demographic here so that kind of idea is better looked at by some others.
 
yakuzaemme said:
1. Increase quality of the threads on the forum drastically
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yakuzaemme said:
^ I am reposting this. Those stats are REALLY interesting to me. Over 50% of all the threads gets less than 10 replies.

I am therefore not agreeing on the whole 'users search to find answers'. Nothing in the content-side will change, just that the average threads will be longer, easier to find the discussions and answers you're looking for and much more tidy. The threads that right now spark no real conversation will just be moved to the chat.
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Just because a thread has less replies, doesn't make it less valuable. In fact, the opposite may be true: The first reply may have answered the question perfectly, whereas threads which meander along may do so because there are disagreements as to what the solution or answer is.

So, number of replies cannot be used as the sole criterion to measure the usefulness of a thread.

By the way, great job aggregating the data. Good on you, for sincerely trying to improve the forum!
​
 
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reuse said:
Just because a thread has less replies, doesn't make it less valuable. In fact, the opposite may be true: The first reply may have answered the question perfectly, whereas threads which meander along may do so because there are disagreements as to what the solution or answer is.

So, number of replies cannot be used as the sole criterion to measure the usefulness of a thread.

By the way, great job aggregating the data. Good on you, for sincerely trying to improve the forum!
​
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Of course. Some better KPI to use would be average views per week, and with that get a percentage of threads that are actually re-visited often.

I don't have that data, so I use what I can get haha.

And thanks for the compliment!
 
An idea:

-Users can send a message in the chat every 3-5 seconds to reduce spam.
-Users can vote to get a message remove. As in, when 3-5 or a certain number of people vote on a message they dislike, it automatically gets remove.

This live chat feature would be awesome for me.
 
Social God said:
An idea:

-Users can send a message in the chat every 3-5 seconds to reduce spam.
-Users can vote to get a message remove. As in, when 3-5 or a certain number of people vote on a message they dislike, it automatically gets remove.

This live chat feature would be awesome for me.
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In my opinion
1) users still bot home with 15-30 second delay or something like that

2) this can be abused by users who have a grudge/etc
 
Chats with thousands of users can get very messy. I don't like the idea. Valuable information gets lost very easily.
 
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