i think there should be a way for full members friends to chat with each other like in facebook or something but more like publicly always visible only to moderators i used to be a member of a forum named quoted they had a chat window for friends you add well idk maybe with all things moderators cant monitor a chat too fast and too long and not completely public or am i wrong ?? just a suggestion :icon_wink i love this website and i wish the best for it
I would say (and this is my opinion, not necessarily that of that staff as a whole) that it's very doubtful just because of the sheer number size. As of now we have 17 staff and a grand total of 54,993 members. Naturally not of all these are active members. But even if we only took a fourth of that number, that's over 13,000 members for which the staff would have to try to monitor all their friend conversations.
There is a feature available that operates the same way as Facebook chat, and it is something that may be implemented in future to allow our Staff Team to interact with a member in crisis onsite within a real-time and private environment. It isn't something that has really been discussed in-depth (or recently), so that's something that is further down the road. I can see the benefits of such a feature being integrated into a Friends list, but I'm just not sure how realistic it would be to monitor. As Jonathan touched upon, it would take a lot of effort to keep track of everything, and it becomes another distraction away from EC's primary purpose of operation. The Chat Room is already a pretty big drain on staff resources in that regard, so more communicative features to keep track of would be a liability without the resources to secure it. At this point in time, it's just not something we can really accommodate. It might be something we can consider again in future though, once our volunteer recruitment process is firmly established and the staff team numbers reflect the size and activity of EC. Sorry for the rather unsatisfying answer. I know that I've sort of left it indefinitely unanswered without a definitive answer one way or the other, but I'm not a fan of permanent 'nays' to ideas, so who knows how feasible it could be in future.
