Hey @citizen428 im happy to give you some feedback here:
Live chat is a big feature in the context of community and teams. Having the ability to chat with someone via Connect directly on 1VIBE meant that I did not have to go to another app like Discord, Instagram, or WhatsApp. Live chat is also useful to admins of small communities with users who are not familiar with markdown so they need some guidence which is best provided in a live manner directly on the website. For the short period of time that I got to use Connect, I would say that most conversations were work related where I was exploring ideas with people or collaborating on some sort of task. I feel like these days users expect live chat to be natively baked into social applications or websites that function as communities. An argument can be made that how good your live chat feature is, plays an important role in how much time users are spending on your app. I personally believe this is the main reason why Discord has become synonymous with community. Most of my experience as a web designer has been with Wordpress as the CMS and for many of those websites I always wished there was an easy way to add a well built live chat feature.
I can't say too much about what I disliked other than a few bugs I was experiencing, one being a scrolling issue on mobile when chat became long enough to scroll. Another one that stood out is that some users were confused about the fact that two users need to follow eachother before they could send messages.
I think it was made clear to me by the Forem team real early on that Connect wasn't a fully fleshed out live chat feature. With that being said I did not have many expectations beyond the basic ability of being able to chat with users who created accounts on 1VIBE. I don't think Connect needs to have all the live chat features that an app like Discord has, but I do think that it needs to work really smoothly and be easy to access/navigate. Since I no longer have access to the feature I cant really give more in depth feedback, but I do want to emphesize that I think a simple but really well built live chat feature can be very valuable to Forem communities who are small or medium size. Im not sure how well recieved Connect was with users of a large community like DEV.
Thanks a lot for the very detailed response, it's much appreciated! All of this can serve as input for any potential future iterations of chat in the Forem ecosystem.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Hey @citizen428 im happy to give you some feedback here:
Live chat is a big feature in the context of community and teams. Having the ability to chat with someone via Connect directly on 1VIBE meant that I did not have to go to another app like Discord, Instagram, or WhatsApp. Live chat is also useful to admins of small communities with users who are not familiar with markdown so they need some guidence which is best provided in a live manner directly on the website. For the short period of time that I got to use Connect, I would say that most conversations were work related where I was exploring ideas with people or collaborating on some sort of task. I feel like these days users expect live chat to be natively baked into social applications or websites that function as communities. An argument can be made that how good your live chat feature is, plays an important role in how much time users are spending on your app. I personally believe this is the main reason why Discord has become synonymous with community. Most of my experience as a web designer has been with Wordpress as the CMS and for many of those websites I always wished there was an easy way to add a well built live chat feature.
I can't say too much about what I disliked other than a few bugs I was experiencing, one being a scrolling issue on mobile when chat became long enough to scroll. Another one that stood out is that some users were confused about the fact that two users need to follow eachother before they could send messages.
I think it was made clear to me by the Forem team real early on that Connect wasn't a fully fleshed out live chat feature. With that being said I did not have many expectations beyond the basic ability of being able to chat with users who created accounts on 1VIBE. I don't think Connect needs to have all the live chat features that an app like Discord has, but I do think that it needs to work really smoothly and be easy to access/navigate. Since I no longer have access to the feature I cant really give more in depth feedback, but I do want to emphesize that I think a simple but really well built live chat feature can be very valuable to Forem communities who are small or medium size. Im not sure how well recieved Connect was with users of a large community like DEV.
Thanks a lot for the very detailed response, it's much appreciated! All of this can serve as input for any potential future iterations of chat in the Forem ecosystem.