Sunday, March 27, 2005

Chat room

I thought of adding a chat room/message board to this site, but I discovered Andy and Liz's Radio Free Phoenix already has an excellent one going. Click here to go to the Radio Free Phoenix forum and get in on some fun discussions about Valley radio, past and present (of particular interest to this group may be the "Free Form Radio History" thread). You can also click on the link at the top of this page to go directly to the forum.

2 comments:

Andy Olson said...

Jimmy, thanks for providing a link to the Radio Free Phoenix message board. It's true, there's a wealth of information to share about Phoenix Radio of the past, especially those where freedom reigned!

vagabondvet said...

Hi, Jimmy, nice forum! I just posted a note there. A minor but possibly significant (for some, anyway) correction, though... the message board is just that, often referred to as a forum, but it's not a chat room - a chat room is a site where a number of users can log on all at once and type back and forth to each other in real time, much like an instant messaging program, where you can see the other person's entries (and vice versa) as soon as the sender hits [ENTER]. The screen keeps scrolling up as users type their messages, and (unless the user 'logs' the conversation) they're gone as soon as you log off, there's no permanent record as in a forum (message board). Chat rooms are live, real time, and (usually) temporary. If Liz and Andy want to install a chat room on their phpBB forum, there are mods (short for modules in php land) that they can download and install that will provide this capability, but unless you're going to have several people logged on at once and 'talking' to each other, like in a meeting or something, and you don't want a permanent record of the conversation, it's really more 'fun' than 'practical.' I find the forum format, where there's a permanent record of your entries, much more useful, and the phpBB software is an excellent software platform to run it on, probably the best. I'm an administrator (though on an extended sabbatical at present) and one of the founders of a political phpBB site (jregrassroots.org) where we have all three: a forum, a blog, AND a chat room. They're all different critters, though, and serve different purposes, though a blog and a forum are more closely related (permanent record) than their cousin the chat room (temporary record, unless deliberately saved). Offered humbly in the spirit of friendship and clarification...

:~)aniel