This morning I finished up what some might call "chat". I have been against this feature for a long time because it really didn't tie into the forum as well as I thought it should have, After some tweaks to it I have come up with what I think works very well. If you are on a computer you will notice a conversation button in the bottom right of the screen. If you click on it you will see all of your conversations (Private messages). You can start a new private message with someone and it will open up a "chat" window with that person. You can then converse back and forth in real time while you are still on the forum. This could be useful if someone wanted you to help them locate something on the forum. You could actually send them a link in the chat box to the page and when they click that link the chat box will stay on top and they can go right to what you sent.
Another feature that I like is that you can send a message to someone and a chat window will open. You can close it if you done want to see it. OR you can leave it open and you will see the persons reply immediately .
AND If you don't care about this new feature you can just send messages the same way you always have...
The next feature I brought back was the "friend" feature. You can now create your friend list again. This works completely the same as it did before. I just could bring the old friends list over to this new version of forum software. You can add friends by clicking on a members name and going to their profile page. The is a button what will allow you to send a friend request. Once they approve you will have a box on the right of the forum page and the dashboard page that will show you if they are online or not.
Im going to include some pictures of both features and where you can find them.
Both features are optional and you don't even have to acknowledge they exist if you don't want to use them. If you do,,, they are ready to use now...
P.S. I have not looked at the chat feature from my phone or tablet yet. I believe it works in a similar way . I will confirm later and post back here. Or maybe two other members will try the feature out and confirm how it works.
