General Site Chat Feature

I had recently been asked to do a site with chat features that are eaiser to use and those using do not have to be members of the site to use it.

This is the download site > http://hot-things.net/

awesome discovery.. many thanks. :)

i think tussery will be very happy. He always wanted a better chat system.

If you want to use Dolphin's existing flash chat, you can make it visitor friendly easily enough:

Admin>Modules>Flash Apps>A/V Chat/Admin - this will pop up a new chat window as an administrator. Click on the "Membership Settings" icon (2 to the right of the "whisper" button). The pop up window allows you to set the access for each of your membership settings, including non-members (i.e. visitors/guests).

One of the things that my members have a challenging time is finding he darn chat option. I thought that the menu on top had chat, I cannot find it.

How do you guys educate your members to do things?

 http://www.boonex.com/n/faq-for-your-site-2012-01-13-21-00

 when u say friendly, do they still have to enter the age and description?

also tying up the entire page for chat is not good sometimes, this is just for a quick solution.

Looking at site stats, the default Dolphin chat links are never used most times.

You can put your chat on your top navigation menu very easily. The Chat Menu item is just way far over in the list by default so that it falls into the "More" menu items drop down list. Admin>Builders>Navigation Menu just find the Chat item and drag it over to the left so that it is in the immediately visible options. (You can control how many items are visible in the top menu: Admin>Advanced Settings>Other.)

We've had a hell of a time educating our members on how to use things, Dolphin's set up doesn't seem to be 'intuitive,' at least to our members. We've created an extensive FAQ using a paid mod so that it is somewhat searchable (the failures of the Dolphin's search options is one of the things that makes the site hard to use for our members, it doesn't allow our members to help themselves). And we've added page blocks to most pages with some basic info and links to the related FAQ listings, which clutters up the site a bit but does help. AND we've gotten much more patient with helping members out when they have questions. 

When I say visitor friendly, I mean that you can make it visitor accessible. If you look at the path I listed, you'll see what settings you can adjust. I'm assuming that if it is for non-members that they don't have to sign in, but I don't allow visitors to chat on my site. The best option to find out how it works (and if it works for what you want) is to change the settings so that non-members have access to chat and then log out and see what it looks like from a visitors perspective.

Our chat is used fairly often, but we've moved it to a prime spot on the menu so that it is very noticeable and for a while we placed a chat icon that we created on the front page that links to chat directly.