I tought about this a long time ago but forgot it.

anyway here i go...
what about a live chat at the "home" area above the LB would be a cool feature ^^

perhaps, but all I see stemming from that is track spam. Everyone uses an IM client these days, and the vast majority of these support group chat.

We had live chat in TM1! It was called PlayPal Online!

eyebo says:
We had live chat in TM1! It was called PlayPal Online!

If only TM2 had that...

An IRC channel might be cool tho.

eyebo says:
We had live chat in TM1! It was called PlayPal Online!

haha lol haha lol hihihi lol hehehe

Ye,an IRC channel would have been nice,but I dont really see its use,we already got some TM channels to talk on,and it wont be any different theme on this one

We actually had an IRC channel for TMX. The link to it was stickied in General Chat forum on United TMX for a long time. Hardly anyone supported it. And when I say supported.. I mean no one idled there.

I think it's probably due to the fact the majority of players/builders here aren't savvy enough about old technologies like IRC to make use of it, and also due to the fact they don't understand the concept of idling. They join and see 15 people in the channel and think they must all be active. They say "hi". No one responds immediately, so they leave.

I'm not against IRC. I idle (and occasionally chat) in #maniaplanet on QuakeNet, a bunch of channels for my Minecraft servers, my old clan's channel on EFnet, and in some developer's channels on EsperNet. I also used to hang out on #et.tm on Quakenet. A lot of well known TM players hang out there; mostly those that are around the eSport scene.

I've had almost a 24/7 presence on IRC since late 1998. So I'm certainly not against the idea. But we just haven't had good success with a TMX channel in the past. I don't really see that changing. It's an old technology for, mostly, older users.

The forums here are really the best way to meet up with people and communicate across timezones. If you need to do something more one-on-one... I'd opt for Skype or MSN or another IM service these days. Some of these even have a group chat function if you need to organize something with multiple parties. It's how I usually organize duo tracks and the like. And if you're doing such a project, it's probably going to be with someone you already know anyway.

Finally, adding a chatroom on the site itself would be really hard to moderate, and we'd need people to watch it 24/7 otherwise it could be overrun with spam. I'd say it'd be more prone to that than even the chat in-game on a server.

In my opinion the forums, augmented with existing IM services, is sufficient for our needs on MX. Maybe MrA and Forzyy would have different ideas on it. But those are my personal views.

Actually I like the idea of a mx-chat, although not on the front page.

The problem with chat clients is that everyone is using another one. Some are using Skype, some are using MSN, the next uses yahoo, AIM, some are using multi-clients. Other people are on irc only and also many (me including) don't use one at all or only use voice chat with their friends.
Then you have to add people to your buddy-list before you can chat, so you can't just join a room and start blabbing. Also it's ok to join a chat-room and talk to somebody but still you might not want to have all those people in your messengers buddy-lists, or even worse - on your teamspeak server.

So an extra page for mx-chat would be pretty cool I think.
All kind of links could be disabled, so we don't have people spamming track-links over the place.

If it's not on the front page, then it's just the forums ... the off-topic pit is usually full of chat. I don't see why we would need a separate entity for chat.

Forum is posting messages.
Chat is talking.

That's definitly not the same.

First of all, there's no room for a chat on the front page. It would be nothing more but a shout box. Besides I wouldn't want to have messages going on all the time while I'm watching the site.
When I want to chat I'll use a seperate window.
It could be either a page in the site or a popup window that runs while I can still surf mx.