It would be nice to have a faction comm channel for ICA, NCC, and CIS. It would make it easier to communicate between the faction planets-especially in the CIS sector as there are multiple planets separated from each other.
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I recently suggested to have planet wide com channels (not only for site owners) as well. I like the idea of having a faction com channel.
What rules do you suggest? Should a non-faction member be able to join the faction channel?
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Non-faction members could join-it would be a great way to promote trade.
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I agree. There is nothing else locking us to a single faction, I don’t think chat should either.
I don’t think any other rules could really be set.
A list of public channels, if we don’t already have it, would be nice.
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Here my general take on this - both concerning open planet and faction chats:
System-generated, themed chat rooms only really make sense with a fully managed set of members.
IMO, when the system “seeds” a chat-room with certain members automatically (based on faction membership, bases on a planet, whatever), but then allows those members to leave and others (not falling under the seed criteria) to join, what’s going to happen is that the original topics of these channels will increasingly be ignored and we just end up with hundreds, if not thousands of generic chat rooms that “used to be faction/planet channels”.
I’d rather have a system like this:
- Have strict auto-join rules for faction or planet chats that are exclusive to the companies matching the respective criteria.
- Allow users to create own public group channels for whatever purposes they see fit.
The latter will allow such channels to grow naturally without us “priming” anything. It will require a few more technical additions, though. I’m thinking of more IRC-like features like admin and mod roles for channel members.
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I see where you want to take this, but I disagree. Take a planetary, public com channel for example: this channel is available to everyone by clicking a button in the PLI tile. That way it can be found easily and has a pretty fixed topic. Sure, these channels will have a lot of off-topic chatter, but that is okay.
Imagine what happens if we don’t provide a fixed channel: People will create five different “Promitor-Trading-Channel” variations every three months. These channels will eventually be deserted and are hard to find. Why not seed them and create a link to them?
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Fair point I didn’t consider. But we’d only see the channel, not the members, right?
And would all of those channels show up in the global chat room catalog?
Not sure what you mean with that. Until one joins the channel the member list is not available.
I think we’d have to redesign the channel catalog. We probably need to make the list searchable by channel name (and description?!) or not list these kinds of channels to keep the list short.
I mean that we auto-create the channel, but don’t automatically add members (like it’s done for the existing planet chats).
Yes, auto-creation would suffice. We could add site owners to the public planet channel as well, but I am not sure if we should.