- Joined
- Oct 23, 2011
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- 1,671
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Just some random observations . . .
When the local B&M was being built there was a bunch of that would setup our chairs in the yard after work, smoke and admire the progress. So I thought of doing a virtual lounge and setup a free Slack space for the group. Shop has been open for a year and half now and 80,000 messages has been exchanged and over 5GB of images uploaded.
Well that became a problem because under a free account you cannot clean up files very easily. Another issue for a free account is setting up a new device and recovering passwords and getting back into the group. This second reason accounted for about 2/3s drop off of those that originally signed up.
So I decided to move the group to Discord, which is a gamer's chat app. No surprise that speak-easy.club that has a lot of younger pipe smokers use that for their chat app. Here looks like a simple javascript chat window. Over on Briar Patch they use Chatzy. Doesn't look like Pipe Smokers Den does anything and Tamp and Puff is all but about dead. I guess I could do another post just on the differences/similarity of tech/demographics of these communities but I digress.
One thing I tried to do with Slack was basically take BoB-like forum and make channels for each section topic. It got out of hand over time. Folks were posting stuff in wrong channels and for the most part moderated free. We had rubber room and political channel for those folks that want to go off the deep end but again stuff started to bleed everywhere and had to clamp down. Some folks got a little mad. Oh well.
So on Discord I reduced the chat channels to cigars, pipe/tobacco, sports, politics, jokes SFW, jokes NSFW, general, general NSFW and a couple misc channels related to shop events. We will see how this experiment goes.
Other chat's around are some YouTuber's, like London Calling, will do a live stream and interact with folks in the chat window. I dunno, something relaxing having a virtual smoke with people around the world.
When the local B&M was being built there was a bunch of that would setup our chairs in the yard after work, smoke and admire the progress. So I thought of doing a virtual lounge and setup a free Slack space for the group. Shop has been open for a year and half now and 80,000 messages has been exchanged and over 5GB of images uploaded.
Well that became a problem because under a free account you cannot clean up files very easily. Another issue for a free account is setting up a new device and recovering passwords and getting back into the group. This second reason accounted for about 2/3s drop off of those that originally signed up.
So I decided to move the group to Discord, which is a gamer's chat app. No surprise that speak-easy.club that has a lot of younger pipe smokers use that for their chat app. Here looks like a simple javascript chat window. Over on Briar Patch they use Chatzy. Doesn't look like Pipe Smokers Den does anything and Tamp and Puff is all but about dead. I guess I could do another post just on the differences/similarity of tech/demographics of these communities but I digress.
One thing I tried to do with Slack was basically take BoB-like forum and make channels for each section topic. It got out of hand over time. Folks were posting stuff in wrong channels and for the most part moderated free. We had rubber room and political channel for those folks that want to go off the deep end but again stuff started to bleed everywhere and had to clamp down. Some folks got a little mad. Oh well.
So on Discord I reduced the chat channels to cigars, pipe/tobacco, sports, politics, jokes SFW, jokes NSFW, general, general NSFW and a couple misc channels related to shop events. We will see how this experiment goes.
Other chat's around are some YouTuber's, like London Calling, will do a live stream and interact with folks in the chat window. I dunno, something relaxing having a virtual smoke with people around the world.