Last month I was told within live chat personal or private chat was coming. Has that happened yet? If so, what are the instructions. Thank you.

Hi Lisa,

Here is the forum posting about the Instant Messanger.
http://forums.classcreator.com/messages.cfm?threadid=92DC86ED-9CAE-80B9-0628E84B5B8DEFC2

My instant message box is missing. How do I get that back?

Hi Lisa,

Did you already solve this? When I go to your site the instant message box is displaying. If you are not seeing it you might want to clear your browser cache and try again.

yes it is working.

I tried setting up a group Live Chat for the first time and it didn't turn out so well. I opened a live chat window at the designatied time that I had email to my class. People would log on, then I would send them a invite from the Chat window. Some were able to go see the invite, click on "ok" and join the chat.

Others would log on, click on the Live Chat link opening their own chat window and inviting classmate to their chat. In each chat window they couldn't understand "where everyone was" and thought no one came to the group chat. I was bouncing around to different chat windows telling people to close their window so I could invite them into the main chat.

This got very confusing trying to get everyone on to one chat window. Do you have a set of instructions on what to do and NOT do when starting/joining a group live chat. What did I/We do wrong?

Please HELP!!!!!

Francine,

with LIVE CHAT, you don't need to moderate with a Instant Message window. Everyone should be able to join by themselves by clicking on the LIVE CHAT link. If you click LIVE CHAT, there is only one chat window and everyone joins the same chat window.

Probably, you should have had a link that said CLICK HERE TO JOIN LIVE CHAT and then when they logged in, they would immediately click that link and join the chat already in progress.

Kyle, the confusion comes because when you've opened an IM window with someone, there is a link right there that says "Invite to join LIVE CHAT" -- which it doesn't really do; it creates a limited chat with just those two people but in a larger window.

Actually it doesn't say "Invite to join LIVE CHAT." If it did that would definitely be confusing. What you see in your Instant Messenger is a "Private Chat" button. "Private Chat" in and of itself should convey that this is not the public live chat but rather a chat room you're starting privately. To make it really clear what this is we also added a bubble tip "Click to jump to a larger Private Chat environment."

I can certainly see how confusion could arise if everybody is brand new to both features though. The best thing you can do prior to your first Live Chat session as tell people exactly what link to click on to get into the Live Chat (i.e. tell them to click "Live Chat" on your left navigation and NOT to open a private chat room from inside the Instant Messenger). Further I'd advise them to read the directions that come up the first time you use the feature. I know most people probably skip the instructions but you'll find those instructions really enhance your experience in the Live Chat room. There's some really neat stuff you can do in there such as sharing photos and videos and the instructions make it easy for anyone to use the more advanced features.

Kyle, thanks for the suggestion of a link for Live Chat. Will do that in announcement form for our next attempt at a group chat next weekend.

LOL, John you hit the problem I had right on the head. People were opening the IM's and iviting others to "private chat"!

Earlier in the week I had sent an email to all explaining what we were doing, date and time and instructions. I don't know.....I thought it was a pretty simple thing....Login, go to left column of site, click Live Chat.

What one or two people did say is that after they clicked live chat, they did not see a chat window open until they "shrunk" the main site window down...the chat window popped up behind the main screen....don't know why.

Question: once we are in a chat room and using the box in the right panel where it says invite, if you click that it will send an invitation to a classmate to join. I did that for a few but they said they didn't see anything to click on to join us. What should they have seen?

Hey I know you! (lol)

Of course, Brad, you're right "Private Chat" No other class members were presently online when I posted that and I went from a (bad) memory.

Even so, it is confusing. Isn't THAT (Private Chat) what we're doing when I click on their name and invite them to respond?

Yes that's private chat. But that's of course different from the PUBLIC Live Chat that's one of the main site links. We did all we could to make it clear with the bubble popup but definitely open to suggestions on how to make it more clear still. There's 2 variables in play here:

1) The "Private Chat" button. Should it be called something else?

2) The bubble text you get when you hover over the Private Chat button. Should it say something different from what it says now?

We're all ears if any of you have suggestions for improvement.

Hey Kev! I know you too!