Boards competing with the Shoutbox

[James Gryphon]

We installed a shoutbox on our 2.0.11 forum not too long ago. It seems to be wildly popular; in fact, if you ask me, I think it might be a little too much so. Activity seems to have dropped a bit as far as posting goes, and it seems that people have taken their conversations to the box instead.

(It's worth noting that our community is hardly in ideal circumstances as it is; the forum we're on was set up as a temporary replacement for a company's official forum (which this forum's staff also ran). That forum has had a lot of trouble staying up, and right now it's looking like our "temporary" forum may be around a lot longer than we had initially hoped.

The official forum never had a shout box. At the time we talked about it (back in 2011), we all agreed that it would be too hard to moderate (given that our community is trying to be very family-friendly). With the forum going down, though, the administrator suggested that if we were ever going to try it out, the backup forum would be a good place to do it.)

We've asked our members what it is that they like about the shoutbox. The consensus is that it's easier to keep up with new stuff (given that it updates automatically with AJAX), it's quicker to post there, and it's very easily accessible to everyone, being at the top of every page.

I'm considering what to do about this. On the one hand, I (and some more cynical members ) are concerned it might be hurting the community's atmosphere. On the other hand, if we could make the regular forum experience better in other ways, maybe this "infatuation" with the shoutbox would be balanced out. I've considered psychological, but relatively minor changes like moving the shoutbox to the bottom of the screen instead of the top. We might end up doing that anyway, but I was curious if any other, more experienced admins had any other ideas that could help with this.

I've wondered whether it would be feasible to make the whole page AJAX, like the shoutbox... as this idea doesn't seem to have been implemented anywhere in the SMF community that I can tell, I'm guessing there must be a good reason for not doing it, but not being adept with the technical side of things, I'm not sure why that is; if anybody's willing to clue a newbie into that, I'd appreciate that, too.

(On the side: I did give ENotify a run. The users, and I both thought it was a little too "busy".)

Thanks in advance for any tips y'all have to offer.

[Kindred]

Ajax for posts is just too "heavy" (in terms of server and database resources) on anything more than a tiny forum

Then again, a simple page refresh will handle it for your users....