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Here's my idea

How nice would it be if the Moderators here can start permanent chat rooms / Live discussions for the community on various topics, The chat rooms will be permanently available so the experts can choose what rooms they join and people with problems can join in and start live / normal chat.

I mean something like this....

  • Breathing meditation chat room
  • Vipassana practicalities chat room
  • Mindfulness in modern society chat room

The reason why i'm saying this?

  • This must be started by the moderators because it gains easy merit in that way and only they can send a massage to all the users of this community.

  • If this form of chat exist it would be easier for Bloggers and other web masters to link our community properly.Because it is hard to find a question once you see the need to link it (Say someone wants to link his site's Mindfulness video to a discussion to our SE, There is no place he can actually link it to unless he is able to find the question himself)

But if there was a chat visitors will easily see the community and join in. This would also be a good way to promote because they are not joining a community blindly. They have seen us and what we do.

Example - Join the chat about Mindfulness on Buddhism SE

  • We can even have announcements

Example - *Tomorrow Ven.Yuttadhammo will answer your questions on breathing meditation in this chat room on this day at this time, Feel free to leave your questions if you are busy that time*

The biggest reason of all is once you are in discussion you get to learn what you do not know, And this give the opportunity for people to come up with questions that they themselves did not know existed within.

I would like to propose fellow members of the community to not to argue about technicalities or practicalities and just jump in. Because as far as i see it here in Buddhism SE every good idea is well discussed but never taken beyond this Meta.

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Even without/before creating a new chat room, there's a chat room here which anyone almost any user of this site can use any time for almost anything.

What you can't easily do is tell other people to be there in that room too.

Sometimes, if there's something to discuss, someone can post a message here on Meta like this one (A chat session about the direction of Buddhism SE) and some people will join in then, temporarily.

It is also possible to have (i.e. I think that software maybe supports announcing) scheduled events, however we have no scheduled events like that to announce.

Also any subject matter experts might find it easier to answer questions on the main site than in a chat room (for various reasons, including that people can take their time to ask well-asked questions, and people don't need to coordinate their schedules to be in the chat room at the same time, etc.).

Some other SE sites have ultra-active chat rooms (e.g. CodeReview.SE has this chat room) which has people chatting all the time ... IMO having a dedicated core of users in the chat room (and on their meta) is part of the reason why they're graduated (not a Beta site any more) ... I think however that they use[d] their chat room for chat ...

  • To discuss the weather
  • To discuss each other
  • To discuss their site
  • To encourage each other to participate (post, vote, and edit) more on their main site
  • To discuss what to post on their meta

... but not instead of posting content on their main site (the content remains as Q+A on the main site).

If this form of chat exist it would be easier for Bloggers and other web masters to link our community properly.

I happened to notice recently that, for example, this page (and probably every other lecture of his) links to Buddhism.SE as a place to ask questions about the lecture. The link include an 'alan-wallace' tag (currently the site contains no questions with that tag).

Probably that's a proper way to link to the site. See Can I support my product on this site? Maybe there are users who are 'watching' (i.e. who have favourited that tag.

Alternatively I suppose a blogger could link to a tag like if they thought that would interest their readers.

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Thanks for the input.

I think it would be better to keep to the SE-format, i.e. asking and answering questions on the main site and not in chat rooms.

It might become more difficult to find hidden gems and insights in a long chat log and most people do not have the time to go through a long log, while other users might not even check a chat log.

Asking and answering questions in a chat could become too "messy", when new participants or new users open up a chat log and have to go through it.

If users would like to debate and discuss some topics in depth, that is where the chat option comes in handy.

As Chris mentions it might be very beneficial to have highly active chat-rooms but I think that asking and answering questions should be done on the main site so that all users can benefit from it, thereby keeping users in mind that may not visit the chat rooms.

Another important thing I would like to mention is that most people are busy with their lives and practice, so there might not easily be experts available for extended durations of time, as it is needed in a chat. When asking and answering questions on the main site, people can come and go as they like. In a chat, an expert cannot just leave if he/she needs to.

If this form of chat exist it would be easier for Bloggers and other web masters to link our community properly.

I think it would actually become more difficult to link to a chat room. Then the visitors on that blog would enter a chat room with a long chat log, when they go to the link. It might be easier to just link to a tag as Chris proposed. Then the visitors will get a full overview of all questions and answers containing that tag.

  • Visitors with no previous reputation can read chat but not post there... but can post on the main site. – ChrisW♦ Dec 8 '15 at 23:14

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