Are you looking for an outsourced / hosted solution or 'off the shelf' software you can install and run? Just the technology or also the people to answer the questions? I remember looking into server side chat software a good few years ago now and not getting that far - pretty flakey products at the time.

I guess you could of course go 'quick and dirty' with an instant messaging (IM) solution or go the full hog with a fully outsourced customer service solution of which online chat is a part (e.g. LivePerson - http://www.liveperson.com). Here the technology element is only a small part of the value proposition.

Ashley

OK. To me there is quite a difference between 'chat' and a bulletin board / message board / threaded discussion forum - this thing on e-consultancy being the latter. The key differences, in my mind, being that chat is 'synchronous' and usually not stored/archived/searchable whereas forums are asynchronous (you can reply whenever) and the contents are stored, viewable, searchable etc.

Somewhere I think I have a list of the latter.... A very propular one that springs to mind is Infopop (http://www.infopop.com/) which you see on a lot of sites. As you can see we decided to do things in house. Why? A variety of reasons but the 3 most important being:

- we reckoned we could do a better job than most
- we would retain ownership of the code, giving us control and flexibility to modify etc.
- we would retain ownership of all the related content and user data

This final point is the most important one for us. Tricky to do persaonlisation, for example, if your content and user data is sitting on someone else's server. I'm sure we could do something similar for you if you wanted... ;)

The short answer on your question about monitoring is that you cannot afford to rely on software - only the user community itself can effectively police a forum. It's tempating fate to say we haven't had any problems in these forums but I'd hope people can see that they are a forum for serious, professional debate and knowledge exchange and, as such, are self-policing. Of course you also have to be registered to post (normal for most forums) which would help us track and block any abuse.

Vbulletin, Infopop, wwwthreads, phpbb, etc. are all very stable clients. I've used them all in communities I've built and managed. However, dont be fooled - they're never FREE in the long run.

You can read a case study I wrote on open source client software at http://www.communitypeople.net/cases.asp and you will see that is rarely if ever FREE to use open source software or stand alone client software, such as vbulletin, etc.

On the other hand, developing your own client software is also VERY EXPENSIVE in terms of a developer's time. Of course, if you have a developer on salary with nothing else to do, fabulous! But the software takes time to develop, as well.

I've been in online community for nearly 10 years and in my experience, it's almost always cheaper to use an ASP (application service provider).

AS for moderation, there are several options, including recruting volunteer moderators from within your community membership. If this isn't a viable option at the moment, you can hire excellent moderators.

If you're looking for synchronous (live) interactive tools, then you'll need chat, not message boards.

I'd be happy to talk to you at length about your needs and, of course, we'd be happy to provide you with what you need - but barring the sales pitch, please contact me for objective suggestions, if you like.

Cheers,
Rebecca Newton

CommunityPeople.net