Symphony.

One question about that Nurph chat at the bottom of this site: Is it possible to login without allowing access to my Twitter account?

Not yet, I don’t think. It’s a beta product, so I think they do plan to allow other forms of authentication in the future.

We’re just testing this, by the way. Nothing official. So, happy to hear any feedback. I’ve already requested the ability to do “namespacing” so that you don’t leave the chat every time you navigate to a different page. And we’re talking about methods for outputting transcripts as well. Anything else?

So far the chat look just fine for me. But I will not join it until there is a different login option. So if you are talking to the developers this would be my main request.

The chat is not really working for me (Safari 5). I can’t focus the input field and when I try to login via the nur.ph page I get an error message that says:

The change you wanted was rejected. Maybe you tried to change something you didn’t have access to.

Mechanically I think it’s working for me.

It would be nice to have some expanded options for spawning new chat channels. For instance, anyone on a particular URL could create a chat for that page, so users discussing a new extension could pull up a chat just for that extension. Even this gets tricky, since you’d want to be able to be on any page of a thread but still participate in that thread-specific chat.

Also I think the transcript is a key issue. If we were to use the chat instead of or in addition to the forum, it will mean some useful content will no longer be on the Symphony site. I would say that is the deal-breaker for me: If we can get the transcripts, great. If not, then I wouldn’t want any substantive content going on nurph, since it would be better to post it to the forum & have it on the site.

Honestly, even if we have ‘access’ to it, I wouldn’t like it hosted elsewhere at all.

Is it possible to deactivate the whole chat panel? It’s starting to make me nervous to have these buttons appearing after a while like something really important that I instantly have to react on.

Personally I’d prefer to see the IRC channel resurrected and have a bot logging the chats. Nurph seems a little under cooked right now - it feels more like a novelty than a useful addition to the site. Maybe if they take your suggestions on board it will be more useful, but right now it feels like something being shoehorned into a browser just because it’s possible, not because it adds anything over existing technology like IRC.

That’s my 2 cents…

Well… I like that it encourages people to chat as it’s just one click away. IRC doesn’t do that. But I agree that it’s getting more and more distracting.

I second the IRC channel

I’ll put in a third vote for the IRC channel.

I would also recommend Mac users check out LimeChat. It was dead simple for getting on IRC channels compared to Colloquy, which I have never managed to get working properly.

The Nurph developers have been very responsive to our feedback so far. Two changes are in the offing:

1. Unified sitewide chat, rather than a per-URL setup.
2. Optional embedding. The chatroom will also be accessible at a Nur.ph URL, so we can maybe provide the option for our users whether to show it embedded or not. And if not, they can still participate offsite.

These should be rolled out within the next week or two. How does that sound?

Craig, will there be a log of the chat and are there any ideas how to keep track of forum relevant discussions in the chat?

Still in discussions about how to handle transcripts. Once we get that figured out, we may be able to come up with a solution for linking, etc.

Bear in mind, there’s nothing tying us to this solution. We just happen to have the ear of the developers at this point so I thought it would be productive to see if we can make it work for us.

In the end, I just like the idea of being able to interact with the community in real time, and tying it into the site seemed like an obvious thing to do. If you’ve been on IRC at all in the past year you know it’s probably not the solution.

I just like the idea of being able to interact with the community in real time, and tying it into the site seemed like an obvious thing to do.

I agree; I see common a use case of this giving more direct support to someone with a question, who may be new to the community & might not have IRC set up.

If we had a sitewide chat, then also a chat for each thread, perhaps each thread could be linked to it’s transcript. Ideally the transcript would be searchable as well, though I have no idea how that would work.

I just wanted to report that the chat is not visible under Opera (10.54) and the symphony pages are constantly re-loading!