Discussion vs chat: One of the first things a digital gardener must decide upon is whether to build "chat rooms" or "discussion boards" - two very different online landscapes.
Chat rooms are "real time" or synchronous. In other words, your visitors enter the "room" and swap messages instantly. If only one or two users are posting messages, they and the onlookers can be disappointed - particularly if the main topic of conversation always seems to be "Is anybody there?". On the other hand, if the room has too many users, the conversations are lively but they can become confusing and anarchic as you try to work out who said what.
"Discussion boards", on the other hand, are "asynchronous" - unlike chat rooms, the users don't all have to be online at the same time. They are also much more organised than chat rooms, structuring the conversations into broad topics and "threads". Visitors post topics, read messages that other people have left, or add their replies to existing messages.
Discussion board software:
The specific tools you decide upon should be tailored to the overall goals of your Internet project. For P45, we have adapted a very popular discussion board software package called Ultimate Bulle- tin Board (UBB). It's relatively cheap ($199), and easy and intuitive to use for both your visitors and your digital gardeners.
UBB is very flexible, and can be highly customised using your own programming scripts. We have installed versions of UBB on a wide range of Irish sites, from the award-winning architectural portal, Archeire.com, to Circa arts magazine's site, Recirca.com. There is also a free "lite" version of UBB you can try out first, to get used to the installation process.
Whatever chat or discussion board technology you use, it should be reliable, robust and scalable. In other words, it works for hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users, and at least 250,000 messages at any one time.
For further details of UBB, see www.ultimatebb.com