Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Disabling "Launch Chat"

As it stands, there's no way of disabling chats in forum settings, even on a topic by topic basis. Why not?

Why would you need to do this?

To enforce a "forum posts only" approach to RPs if the admin wants it. Granted, it could be put in the rules, but is that enough?

Aren't all posts in the forums, well, forum posts, though?

A forum post is still a forum post, regardless of how it is displayed? If a roleplayer wish to view the roleplay in chat mode, that's up to them.

I personally really like this function, even though I haven't done any actual roleplaying in the forum yet.

I assume the meaning of "forum posts only" is actually more like "you must meet the minimum post length required by our group standards"?

Setting expectations for minimum post length is very common. I can see why you'd worry that having a chat might encourage "too fast" responses. But removing people's ability to use the chat won't help you much in that regard -- clicking reply and jotting in a single sentence is ultra-easy without the chat, and making the decision to take that feature away from your members to prevent potential bad apples from having access to it only robs your members of one of the most popular methods of being able to monitor for new posts without refreshing.

The data shows that there are many multi-paragraph posters who use the chat input. There are also many single-sentence posters who don't ever use the chat feature.

Unfortunately, nothing will replace the role of living moderators to encourage and enforce your community content standards among your members.

Make clear what the rules of your group are and remind people of them now and again, then let them make their own decisions about how they'd like to receive and send posts within those rules.