What About

[scrawnybob]

hi

yep I know this is going to be something of a never ending discussion because the benefits / purpose of chat feature ...

is also its biggest problem

ie. spam and solicitation

IF we had it members can and should be able to use it to give other members a heads up on OPEN to all tournaments that are coming up, or shout outs to see who is going to make a game over at xyz in 10 mins etc

the problem with this from a webmaster POV is two fold ...

spammers and other poker webmasters who are lurking in the forum (and yes we have quite alot of small poker forum webmasters, bigger poker bonus code webmasters etc here) will then have a free and easy opportunity to solicit offers / bonuses and poach members who would have signed up via our links to sites ...

remember signing up via our links costs members nothing and we have alot of better than direct bonus offers for going through our links

but equally on a business front I / we compete with other webmasters for signups which is what earns ALL poker content sites the revenue to finance tournaments, running costs, content etc etc ... so I am really not about to open the site up to abuse and opportunism from other less than ethical webmasters who just wont be able to resist the temptation of trying to get our members to sign up to new sites via them rather than us

obviously everyone is free to signup up how and through whoever they like but this would just become and open invitation for others to take advantage of my time, effort and money in building 4kingpoker

On the list of good things I want to get developed on 4kingpoker, chat isnt as high on the list as more tournaments, more prizes and things like the team challenges within our leagues - as I think these will be much better for discussing poker and getting the community going

we have got buddy lists and things within the profiles and my plans for the teams should also encourage more on forum chat

at the end of the day ... feel free to use the appropiate sections of the forum for posting up the kind of things you would in chat

ie. game at xyz in 10 who's gona come and take a beating from me" ... banter is fine in the forum in the right sorts of threads ... it's only the decent lengthy strategy type posts that we really need to protect from the "me too" posts

if its in the forum then I can monitor and delete spam / solicitation type posts ... in chat there is no way I can watch it 24/7 for the same sort of stuff ... anyone remember just how bad chat got on FTP a while back ? every other comment was a get this bonus / that bonus here is my email addy etc

I've seen some really active "chat style" forum sites without actual chat ... the posts are just as instant and there is always PM's too

It's good that we have more substantial threads about strategy and long may that continue and grow - but so long as the threads are separate and distinct I dont see any problem with forum posts that are chat based also

cheers scrawnybob