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Originally Posted by CleverCowboy
The chat box on this site used to be used often up to 2018. The admin at that time liked to small talk and he drew an audience. The problem was that we were hurting for new threads and posts and some of the chats could have made great threads. Scruffy and I started encouraging members to post instead and we had some success at the expense of the admin. He got mad about it and left the forum. We've had some threads on giving the forum a makeover, and one of the topics was the need for a chat box because removing it altogether was a thought. The younger members liked the chat feature. In fact, some suggested moving the site to Discord and one created a channel already. I have never been on Discord or plan to. Chatting takes your full attention to participate and would be a nightmare to moderate. Plus there was only so much going on in Alizee's life at that time to talk about, so either there would be little to no chatting or members would find something to argue about.
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Here is my thoughts on chat rooms and chat boxes and Discord: They’re great for bringing people together for just shooting the shit but they don’t promote real in depth discussion about the main focus of whatever site they’re used on. You can post images and video links in Discord but you can’t search for them later like you can in a forum like this. I used to frequent a very popular anime forum back in the day. We had a chat box above the forum for people to use when they didn’t have real in depth discussions to talk about. It wasn’t so bad because these users still used the forum and made posts. In addition it wasn’t A TON of users using the chat box either. There are some chat rooms and Discord servers that have so many users that it’s like a bunch of feeder mice moving frantically in a box. So many people are talking at once you can’t keep track of any of the users or their comments. You just see a username and comment for a brief second and it’s immediately replaced by another in the next second. No coherent discussions can take place either.
I like the way the site and the forum looks however I can see some users probably wanting a more phone friendly layout. My only complaint is the lack of a video section with subtitled videos. There are A LOT of Alizée interviews out there and a lot have never been translated. As for users not making as many posts as in the past it’s understandable because Alizée really isn’t making music anymore and isn’t making as many TV appearances like she used to. I think the latest thing she has done is a small appearance on The Masked Singer. She does make posts on instagram almost daily so there is that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CleverCowboy
This forum is full of great threads and well thought out posts. I spent a LOT of time reading through the history and got to "know" members that I never directly interacted with since they left before I joined. Since I've joined, many of the members that are still here or have come and gone I would consider as friends. It's pretty crazy to think about that, but that is the power of forums and the written word. On FB, the meaning of "friends" mean little. A few of my FB friends have THOUSANDS of friends. How is that even possible? It takes time to make a friend and more time to keep a friend.
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There was someone from Norway that I met on this forum back in 2008 and we are still friends today!
One of the ways of making friends online back in the day was using forums like this and then after figuring out the personality of the users you could try becoming friends with them on a messaging application like MSN messenger, AIM, YIM or IRC. I have friends that I made back in 2004 on other forums and we still amazingly talk to each other 19 years later. I have even met up with a few of them in person in real life. I don’t think a chat room application like discord can offer the same thing.
When I first started using FaceBook I was in high school and it was for adding people that you knew and were friends with in real life. People starting using it to add not just friends but acquaintances that they only met for a minute at an event or get-together as well. That’s why you’ll see some people that have over 2,000 friends, they don’t actually know all of these people they just add them because it makes their E-Penis look bigger. There were a couple people in my high school who would try to add EVERY single person at our school who had a facebook account. It was just to make them look more popular than they actually were. People used to say if you only had 50 friends on Facebook then you were a loser. It’s funny looking back, because at one point in time people who communicated a lot through the internet were considered geeks, losers and nerds. And now, the majority of the population is now primarily communicating through text and online outlets. It’s just now the discussions have gotten shorter and dumber due to a lot of forums closing down and getting absorbed into the alternatives like Reddit, Twitter, FaceBook and Discord.