Work continues at a pace and two of the major changes to the new site affect how the chat and forums will work. This post aims to describe the changes and explain why we are making them. We would love to hear your thoughts after reading so if you have any (good or bad) please do post them.

First bombshell… there will be no forum.
Right now we have a forum with a whole bunch of topics ranging from general discussion about anything to forums for specific game talk, the problem is that (like most forums on the web) the topics are set by the forum owner and fixed. There is a limit on how many we could add before it became too large and unusable so the topics have to be general. Another problem is that there are a lot of topics that I (and I assume others) never bother checking as they are of no interest to us, these topics waste space and have to be filtered by the reader when looking at new posts.

We also realize that as the site grows the more popular topics will become flooded and the member who wants to chat about something specific (how to complete DTD on spawns hole punch for example) will find their message is quickly swept off the front page never to return. But fear not you spawn-punch lover, we have a solution…

Each group on the new site will have its own forum which is managed by the group owner and mods they appoint. Members will subscribe to groups as they do now and build up a list based on their interests and how they use the site. When they click on the big “Forum” button at the top of the site they will see a topic for each of their groups each containing messages and sub-topics. Now each members view of the forum is based on what groups they associate themselves with and not some predetermined list we set.

We know that some members may want ways to speak to large numbers of people, and to meet this need we will be auto-joining everyone to some global groups (which they can leave at any time) such as “general discussion”, “help and support” as well as country groups. There will also be official groups for each of our games. We think this will also give new members a good introduction to how groups work and the role they play on the site.

Second up… there will be no site chat.
As the site grows and more members are on-line at the same time the current chat room will become unusable, but just like the forums our solution to this problem is to give each group its own chat room! It will be as simple as clicking on one of your groups (anywhere you see it on the site) and selecting to join chat, once this is done it will remain pinned to your list of chat rooms until you remove it, even if you log off and come back a week later.

Once in a group chat you will be able to talk in real time with other group members who have done the same and are online. A good example of this in practice would be members joining the CC Radio group chat when their favorite DJ is on to send them song requests or chat with other listeners. Everyone in that chat will be talking about the radio so there will be no cross chat from other members who are interested in other subjects.

We are also letting our members chat 1 on 1 using the same system and we plan to extend this to let people set up 3, 4 even 5 way chats. All this takes place in the sidebar on every page of the site, there is a new “chat” tab which glows if someone you are talking to sends a message.

On the new site you are never out of touch with your friends, groups and chats. Oh, and unlike other chat sites we have done this without flash or java, so you should have no problem with it at work or on computers without these plug-ins installed.

And it is fast and efficient.
For those who are not savvy in the way of the web you may want to look away now.

To date we have been using Ajax polling at regular intervals to alert users to things like new messages in their inbox, groups with new shouts or news and to keep them marked as online so their friends can pester them into playing games.

With the addition of chat, things need to happen much quicker than they do now, so we have made the switch to pushing instead of pulling which greatly reduces the background noise, bandwidth and also makes all of the above more instant. In simple terms this means that when something happens we send you the notification instead of you asking every 10 seconds if anything new has happened (and mostly getting a “no” back)

When we are done I will pester Alex into helping me make a blog post all about it, for those that care it is a very interesting topic. With early adopters like Google Talk (in gMail), chat in Facebook, and now us :o) it looks like push or “comet” as it has been nicknamed will feature greatly in the next generation of sites and services, or the “web 3.0″, if you prefer.

Tags: ajax, chat, comet, forums, groups

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 5:05 pm and is filed under CC Site, David Scott. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.