Stormtrack Chat and nowcasting

Joined
Dec 4, 2003
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I have been thinking about the idea of diverting "Nowcasts & Discussion" category over to our Ajax chat system. It's probably not robust enough yet to handle a lot of activity during a tornado outbreak, but this might be an option after the upgrade. This would let us talk in real-time as we watch storms unfold and monitor radar scan by scan.

I went ahead and created a Forecasts & Nowcasts channel. I did some experimenting and found that we can easily preserve conversations from this channel, which takes care of the need to archive events for posterity. The system will also allow users to search the conversations by day & hour in this channel. We would have logging switched off for the Stormtrack Chat general conversation channel (which is pointless anyway and would fill up our database unnecessarily).

So what I'm envisioning is we have a "Nowcast Chat" option under the Target Area forum list. Clicking that takes members directly to the Forecasts & Nowcasts channel, which is kept free of extraneous "noise" and disruption much like Target Area. If people want to talk about cookies and American Idol, they can switch over to the Stormtrack Chat channel and do it there. At the end of the day we can extract a daily archive of the nowcast chat channel and post it in the Forecasts & Nowcasts forum.

Any thoughts on this idea?

While I was in there I trimmed the channels back to a "Stormtrack Chat" channel and a "Forecasts & Nowcasts" channel. At this moment, people can talk weather in the latter channel if they like, but there are no rules in place yet.

Tim
 
A very worthwhile idea, the concerns of which I hope will be solved by the server upgrade - mainly lag time due to the amount of people online when severe weather is active.

The only other concern I have is that there would almost, In my opinion, be a requirement to have someone there who is, shall I say, no-nonsense during all high impact severe weather events to ensure the noise stays in general chat and the forecast/nowcast chat maintains "on target and on conversation". During severe weather nowcasting and forecasting as we know, information is timely and those who are not in there for forecasting/nowcasting purposes should not be allowed to interfere for a second - as you said, people willing to talk about the flies in june and pudding pops should go directly to the main chat.

I think the benefits are huge for such a focused room however. The only other suggestion is, if it is even possible, a chat upgrade from this board - much like the popular "spotterchat" storm spotter chat room.

My 2 cents.
 
In my opinion, be a requirement to have someone there who is, shall I say, no-nonsense during all high impact severe weather events to ensure the noise stays in general chat and the forecast/nowcast chat maintains "on target and on conversation".
Conversations would be logged, so there would be accountability and we would suspend just as if it happened in Target Area. I think that would be a fairly strong deterrent since people can lose access to ST for breaking our more stringently-enforced rules. Each user can type in /block <name> to ignore a specific person, and moderators if they're around can /kick users out. Also the Ajax chat permissions draw upon the general board permissions, so it is even theoretically possible to create a class of users that can access that channel while others can't, sort of like how Bar & Grill opt-in works.

Additionally, since the Forecast & Nowcasts channel feeds off of Forecasts & Nowcasts forum permissions, it too remains off limits to the general public, so "Fred Ford F-150" in Sapulpa still won't be able to blast after a tornado using Stormtrack.

Tim
 
Additionally this change will not be made unless it has a lot of support with the members. If the forum messages work fine for you all, we'll keep it that way.

Tim
 
I like this idea. Watching people discuss a current outbreak in chat mode would be nice. Maybe people already do this? I like the old way to.
 
Depends -- would this chat system be available on mobile devices? Don't forget that as time goes on, more and more people will be accessing storm track via iPhones or Androids and the like, and not all of those platforms support Java or Flash.
 
FYI, as of now:

Trying to talk in regular ST chat brings me this message:

(20:04:22) ChatBot: Error: Invalid channel name: Stormtrack_Chat

My typing into the chatbox erases immediately.
 
I think it is a creative idea and I like the "now" "real time" aspect of it. However, you should understand that you are pretty much giving up the concept of moderation. If you "record" conversations and then plug it into a forum thread, moderating after-the-fact through editing could be problematic (in many ways).
 
As of 11pm CDT the regular chat will show whose logged in, but nothing appears on the board if someone types.. general chat is major broken.
 
Ric Burney:
As of 11pm CDT the regular chat will show whose logged in, but nothing appears on the board if someone types.. general chat is major broken

Noticed that too, Ric. Dangit.
 
Actually the chat works in Firefox. That's what I use and I have been able to use it fine.

But the chat is broken and I will fix it right now.

Good point about mobile devices... that may be a dealbreaker, unless some people want to try testing chat with their mobile devices to see if it works. If we don't pursue this we could probably revisit the idea in the future when we figure out a way to stream posts to a static web html file in realtime.

Tim
 
Re Firefox availability: Yes, only newest versions of Firefox( 3.5+) are apparently affected - as the error message "XML parsing error: No element found" is shown instead of chat. This also happened as of version 3.6.3.
 
Re Firefox availability: Yes, only newest versions of Firefox( 3.5+) are apparently affected - as the error message "XML parsing error: No element found" is shown instead of chat. This also happened as of version 3.6.3.

Must be a problem at your end Tarmo. I just tried the chat with Firefox 3.6.3 and it worked flawlessly.
 
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Thank you John, I will look into that.

EDIT: Here's more detailed report now. The reason apparently for the FF error message is that it receives just an empty page, and tries to decode it as XML. However since there is nothing to decode, the aforementioned error message is shown. Now when I open the chat in Google Chrome, it indeed results in blank page. Tried this on 3.6.3 on two computers(one running Linux and one Windows XP) and same results. Internet Explorer 8(also with compatibility mode) also gets a blank page, with following HTML content received:
Code:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><META content="IE=7.0000" http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible">
 
<META content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" http-equiv=Content-Type></HEAD>
<BODY></BODY></HTML>
I apologize if I am posting this at the wrong thread, and distracting the thread too much with my bug report, however.
 
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