you can start a private chat from someone’s user card or profile same way you can send a pm.
group and team chat channels will appear in the navigation sidebar menu near the bottom. click the pencil icon in the chat sidebar section to see what channels are available to join.
you access chat via the chat icon up at the top next to the search magnifying glass icon.
there are some user settings for chat if you go to your user preferences and tap/ click the chat tab on the far right.
navigation menu (click hamburger icon in top left in desktop or top right in mobile):
yes the real time. i just think you guys should try it and if you like it you can use it. the game topics will be available or you can make them as usual. i can control who can join channels but since anyone can join team groups, the team chats will remain open to any one. however, like the team categories, rules about trolling other teams applies in team chat.
Can we just take a moment to thank @GridironGirl for enabling the team chat option? It is an amazing experience during games. I’m never going back to regular game threads.
i think it’s interesting to note that the Als fans seem to like it but the Ti-Cat guys haven’t really tried it. i don’t mind, i think guys should use whatever they are comfortable with or even both. i love the general game chat. the real time format with no page refreshes and having the chat drawer sit on top make it great for game chat IMO. i’m just aiming to give users the best forum experience and options to choose from.
i will say that i am disappointed that some users cannot get the games they want streamed or available on TV. i sympathize with Ti-Cat fans because they should get their teams games more readily available to them, especially if the league is streaming out of country anyways. that made no sense at all to me that people out of canada could stream but guys in hamilton could not.
I wasn’t around for this week’s games so didn’t participate in a game thread or chat. I watched the Blue Bomber game on PVR and have said before I’m not a big fan of pre season so nothing unusual for me.
When I participated in both the game thread and chat last week I couldn’t ascertain the advantage of chat. I also noticed that only a handful of people participated in chat this week.
Maybe I’m missing something but I find the game day threads much easier to post in and reply to and to use likes and emojis. I’m also wondering if chat tracks likes similar to how they are tracked in regular threads. Again, perhaps I am missing something but I couldn’t tell who it was that liked posts in chat although it was easier to like a post if there was already a like on the board. I also don’t find the interface on chat to be as comfortable and informative as on a regular thread.
Maybe I’ll warm to chat over time but for now I’m going to stick with the regular game threads when I participate. I don’t expect to be going back and forth between the two in a frenzy. But those who prefer chat can of course knock themselves out. The only downside I can see is the potential to split and duplicate commentary with essentially two game day threads active.
Click the expand button so that the game chat takes up your whole page and there you go. You can see everything. If you want to have chat going while you browse the rest of the site, you can do that too, which is nice. But I had no trouble telling who had liked my posts or who could reply. The conversation moved really fast and we had multiple Als fans participating.
Having said that, if a game chat isn’t active, it’s just as dead as a game thread with few participants.
I very well might be missing something and I mentioned that.
Please bear in mind that I am on my iPhone 95% of the time and I know that certain features that work on a computer don’t work on a phone and are different. Have you done what you say on a phone? If so perhaps you or GGirl can enlighten me as to what I am doing wrong. If I’m not getting it I expect there are others in the same boat.
Last weekend I went back and forth between the game thread and the chat and the game on my phone. I had to log in and sit through the 30 second intro every time I left the game and went back. I didn’t bother programming my TV and running the game through it via phone as I knew that would be the only game I watched that way.
My mind is open. I’m just reciting my experience. Maybe others have had the same concerns and probably some just aren’t interested at all. I’m just not getting the benefit so far. Maybe it’s having other things open at the same time as you indicate. although that does nothing for me on my phone. I’ll gladly join the chat if I think it is better or if the majority end up using it. I just hope game thread traffic isn’t cut in half on either medium or whatever the percentage turns out to be.
i have no idea why it would do that. but i also can’t imagine how awful it is to stream to your phone. if you planning on streaming to your phone then use the game topic. but you’ll probably have to keep logging into the stream doing that too. i’m giving users the option to use whatever they want. i have no control over what device you are using, but you can choose which format works better for you.
Well no worries about watching the games via streaming as I have TSN.
I was more concerned about the functionality of the chat features and appearance on my screen. I will go into it again and see if this can be improved but so far I’m not seeing it.
By the way, can you answer my question about whether likes are tracked by the forum software as they are for regular posts? If not is that possible to set up?
those are chat reactions, not likes and at this point they do not count. like how do you score emojis? this is one of the reasons i do not enable reactions on the topics. people will use those instead of likes and they do not score the same way towards trust levels.
yea the thumbs up is a emoji in chat. there is discussion internally with the vendor about making reactions count and how to score them. it would be nice to see just a plain like in chat. the reasoning is the limited real estate (especially in small screen mobile view) and most people who use chat apps like messenger for example, use emojis.
Other than some features not working as well I much prefer the phone. I can access the forum anywhere. I also can type much faster on a phone with one finger than I can on a keyboard with two. I also much prefer the Apple auto correct over the Microsoft version. But that’s just me.
