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Zelda Dungeon IRC channel?

Joined
Oct 14, 2013
Location
Australia
I think this might be a good idea. We'd have a better way to chat to each other then just the forum front page. Also we'd get notifications of when people chat to us and ping our name.

Also it would be a good way to get the ZD and ZI people chatting to each other so we all can become one great community together.

What do you all think?
 

Spiritual Mask Salesman

CHIMer Dragonborn
Staff member
Comm. Coordinator
Site Staff
Yes. And that's kind of the idea . . . one of the ideas behind why I suggested this.
If we merge our Shoutbox will be available to them. If we switch I guess we can decided whether we want to add a shoutbox again, or implement IRC if it's compatible with IP Boards. The only people active over on the ZI forum are the two Admins, and just a few regular users. There won't be many people we'll need to get to know. I think we could keep the shoutbox either way things go. It's our community that makes up the bigger portion of members and it seems like we all agree that we like the Shoutbox.
 
Joined
Oct 14, 2013
Location
Australia
We need to ask the userbase whch they would be more inclined to use, IRC or the shoutbox?
Both have their pros and cons.

I personally don't like the shoutbox all that much only because it forces me to be on the forums always and there's no notification of new user chat happennig there like you can get in IRC. Someone says hello in the shoutbox and no one replies, because either no one is on or no one gets the ping notification saying more chat is hapening there.
 
We used to have one. I think it existed before then as part of the main site, but after the shoutbox got destroyed in August 2011 (like, the shoutbox plugin literally got destroyed because one of our admins liked breaking things) we were forced to use it as a shoutbox until like March 2012. And to answer your question, the majority of the userbase back in 2011-12 hated it. There was also an issue of people from Hyrule.net's irc channel coming over to just spam/troll the chat, since we were on the same server as #Zelda and their site owner, Tappy, assisted with the management of our channel. The channel itself might still exist, but I wouldn't count on it. It was on the irc.paradoxirc.net server if you were actually interested in checking on that.
 

Spiritual Mask Salesman

CHIMer Dragonborn
Staff member
Comm. Coordinator
Site Staff
We used to have one. I think it existed before then as part of the main site, but after the shoutbox got destroyed in August 2011 (like, the shoutbox plugin literally got destroyed because one of our admins liked breaking things) we were forced to use it as a shoutbox until like March 2012. And to answer your question, the majority of the userbase back in 2011-12 hated it. There was also an issue of people from Hyrule.net's irc channel coming over to just spam/troll the chat, since we were on the same server as #hnet and their site owner, Tappy, assisted with the management of our channel. The channel itself might still exist, but I wouldn't count on it. It was on the paradox.irc server if you were actually interested in checking on that.
Austin...
 

Djinn

and Tonic
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Location
The Flying Mobile Opression fortress
It was a bit before/after Austin's time. But strangely the circa 2011 irc chat is still there. And the last time I looked at it which was about two years ago there were still a couple of the old regulars in there. But overall the irc was pretty much hated by everyone.

Although I think I once suggested having a separate window for it elsewhere on the main site similar to how H.net has theirs. Just to keep it around. But by FEbruary of 2012 nobody ever used the place at all.
 

Emma

The Cassandra
Site Staff
Joined
Nov 29, 2008
Location
Vegas
Every time this has been tried before, it's failed. As has been said, when we used it in the past, everyone hated it. It had a lot of problems. It was very difficult to use and it was completely inaccessible to most people because they couldn't understand it. And when you did get in, usually you couldn't use your username or anything close to it because it was actually on a much larger server, Paradox, than just Hyrule.net and usernames are server wide and almost everything you could think of was already taken. So when you talked on there people wouldn't know who you were and you wouldn't know who they were. It was overall very sloppy and unpleasent and going back to it would be a mistake.

Overall.... an IRC would be the same to a modern shoutbox or IM as Windows DOS would be to Windows XP. Some of the same core elements are still there, but it a much more user-accessible form without the crippling restrictions present in the original. Just as there's no sane reason to go back to Windows DOS when you have the modern OSes, there's no sane reason to go back to IRC since what is already used is just a much more modernized and efficient version of the same concept with a much more useful GUI instead of relying on pure text commands that even the best have to constantly look up. The only real reason anyone goes with IRC is the same one for anyone still using DOS commands, nostalgia. There is no benefit in doing it. You'll only cripple the community's ability to communicate and alienate almost everyone.
 

Dabombster

Do the thing
Site Staff
Joined
Jan 9, 2008
Location
Probably somewhere
If anything, I'd suggest using Discord, really. Pretty simple to use. The problem we had when we had a ZD Skype channel was that it pulled people away from the actual site though.
 
Joined
Feb 5, 2016
We use to use IRC a lot at ZI. But it never ultimately amounted to much at the site and basically became it's own thing that most users were never really aware of. I do like Discord, but mostly as a replacement for how we currently use skype for staff communications.

I am not keen on shoutboxes either, but there are some interesting versions of it for IPB.
 

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