Technology & Tobacco

Brothers of Briar

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user 2027

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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.
 
I noticed we have a chat room area, but everytime I go there, no one is on.

Hope your endeavor goes well for you!
 
Ozark Wizard":lb5a43he said:
I noticed we have a chat room area, but everytime I go there, no one is on.

Hope your endeavor goes well for you!
Maybe BoB scheduled chat event for an evening smoke is in order!
 
I would enjoy participating in a group video chat. A breakfast club or afternoon chat would be fun. Google Hangouts work pretty good but I don't know how to set one up. :shock:
 
daveinlax":l2vkk1u6 said:
I would enjoy participating in a group video chat. A breakfast club or afternoon chat would be fun. Google Hangouts work pretty good but I don't know how to set one up. :shock:
Well it has been awhile and had to look. Google Hangouts limits to 10 participants. All you have to do is click on Video and then copy link and post it up here to join. Guess the first 9 people win.
 
So just to follow up. Discord works really well and the app on phone devices is stable and easy to use as well as desktop editions. We gained a lot of people that had dropped off because free Slack makes it hard to rejoin and setup.

On a side note . . . I'm on the BoB chat smoking Sweet Rum Twist if anyone would like to join.
 
So last night I hopped on BoB chat and chatted with Corncobcon for awhile and then Ozark hopped on and I missed it.  I had 3 online group chats going on and the BoB chat doesn't notify when someone sends a message.   Sorry to miss you Ozark!   It was nice to smoke and chat last night. The issue was notifications and constantly being logged out. Oh and no history when you log back in.

I am willing to setup a better chat system on Discord.  It has a nice app for all desktop and mobile devices.  We could create multiple channels if need be but I think one would suffice for now.  It also has a voice chat that would not limit you to 10 people like Hangouts (which is slated to be retired by Google).
 
About the history. I see an Archive button in the upper right area of the chat window. I can see a number of posts. Don't know how much memory it has. And it is possible that it is an Admin thing that no one else sees. I have some moderator functions in there.

Gonna check the board setting to see if there are some feature than can be enabled. Like a notification when someone checks in.

Years ago, in ancient times. On the Knox board. Saturday mornings were a popular chat time. We had big crowds some Saturdays.
 
Ah yes, I see an archive button. Seems wonky. I would expect the messages would show when you login instead of a whole separate screen. So if someone logs in the middle of chat do they have to click archive to get context what people are talking about?
 
I've jumped on the BoB chat a few times, normally I end up talking to myself lol. Had a few good conversations when ever others log on
 
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