@lwsquad and @Setekh lured me into an interesting 3D thread then ninja’d me with IRC chat requests, so I have no choice but to fight back with my mighty information-fist, monkey-style!
First off, there is in fact a #jme channel on freenode, however it is unofficial, unsupported, and not very lively the last time I checked. The problem is it becomes too separated from the rest of our daily workflow. What I want for this site is a Jabber-powered Gmail/Facebook-like chat that follows you around in your footer, as can be achieved by ArrowChat for instance, though there are also some free alternatives worth considering, like Emite, which would leave all the power and responsibility entirely in our own hands.
The genius about this is that it gives users a choice, just like Facebook does (that’s about the only nice thing I can say about it). You can either browse this site and opt in to various chat rooms, or you can connect to our Jabber server via your desktop or even mobile client.
Greater control, greater user freedom. It just takes a very serious commitment, and quite a lot of work, especially if we want to be completely independent of 3rd party services to host our chat rooms. That’s just the end goal though. Maybe we’ll find some cool intermediate solution(s) along the way.
Heh, It’s Ok erlend_sh, I was just simply asking if there was an irc channel. I like the forum structure here, and it’s nice to have the latest topic the way they are on the forums :), no sense in wasting resources on a chat integration system if it’s not needed.
i agree with lwsquad, tho a chat app like Emite would be nice; as im seeing it the forum has grown much larger then some time ago and its still growing; if we are at least 3 or 4 ppl online on that irc during the day it will boost up users confidence and also would get more into our community. I for instance started off as a guest, didn’t need anything else, and now im happy i joined.