Chat welcome area can help us promoting members, its a good way to see who is to be promoted and not, and the area is emptier than my refrigerator so any life would be welcome there.

The questionarrie could use a bit o an update aswell.

Why not put 2+2 together and put a chat button with smth like that says Here is the chat noobies, clock here and check out our community live smth


Cheers

Well, it does get quite lively in there sometimes. It can be a bit head-mangling to try and sustain conversations in both the Welcome area and the main chat however.

When greeting newcomers in the forum, it's currently about 50% of the time that the chat gets mentioned as an option, so adding the chat link to the welcome message would be a simple way of increasing this ratio (assuming the noobs read their PMs).

The chat button on the forum is not exactly hidden, but nor is it especially prominent. What would be the consequences of making it more prominent? Would it be necessary for there to be more troll-bashing and/or policing of rule-breakers if newcomers were more inclined to enter chat?

I mean, sometimes we have some cool convos going on, but lots of times theres me and maybe 1 other person online. Or a bunch of ppl afking. Especially european early hours...

The mods and the chat can take a few more users thats for sure. Whenever Traveler decides to make an appearance we can refreshen it up and make it more noob friendly, and easier to administer aswell.

To the last point, I have talked with a few seniors to keep the moderation serious especially on the Welcome Area part. There's always somerthing crazy happening there hahaha, but it's important to keep a steady clean head. Even though they are trolls, these are people, sometimes they are in trouble, or not in the best place in their life.....

All in all, I still would see more chat users as a definite net positive

Yeah, I have to ration chat to myself because most of the action happens when I should be sleeping. (But, incidentally, a big shout out to all the chat regulars because you have really helped me through something of a dark patch lately.) This mirrors some other feedback that we do make positive contributions to the lives of others through the Chat so whatever effort can be made to engage there will be highly appreciated.