Guidelines for the Professor Dawkins chat

Chris OConnor

Guidelines for tomorrows chat

This same information was posted in The News Room, but I know not all of you read those posts. :rolleyes

<-- wishing you would all read them.

There is no way to know how many people will show up for this chat so please pay attention to the following information. Our current chat room holds a maximum of 25 people. In the future we will have a much more sophisticated chat room where we can have many more participants.

Due to limited seating we are giving priority to active members. This won't be an issue if fewer than 25 people show up, but if more attempt to get into the room here is how we will handle it...

First of all, if you care about this chat session I strongly recommend you are in the chat room before 10:00am Eastern. This will make things much easier.

In the event we have a full chat room we will begin booting people that are not recognized as active members. We'll try to use good judgement and boot names we don't recognize at all first. Then we will move to those people who haven't participated in the current book reading/discussion.

Once again...in the future this won't be necesaary. In fact, I doubt it will be this time. I'm just being cautious. I don't want people mad at me because they were booted. When you are booted the booting won't be accompanied by a lenghty explanation. There won't be time.

Here is the priority for who is admitted

1. Professor Dawkins, the moderators, and of course myself
2. Active members who participated in the discussion on the forums
3. Active members who didn't participate in the discussion
4. Any member
5. Anyone else

I hate to seem so anal about this, but I really don't want to be the bad guy when I am forced to boot people. I just don't have a choice. I'm probably not going to have to deal with this at all as we will probably have less than 25 people.

Important Note:

If you really want to be there be early. Show up at 10:30 and you are screwed if the room is filled. It would be nice to have the room filled by 10:00am.

And don't close the forums window while in the chat room. This used to automatically boot you from the chat room within a few minutes. I;m not sure if it still does, but be careful. If you close it and are booted someone else could take your spot.

Format for the chat:

There isn't one. In the future we will have better chat software and these author chats will have some sort of organized format. There simply isn't a way to keep everyone from talking at once with our current system, so I am counting on people being polite.

Please be courteous. Professor Dawkins cannot answer 10 questions at once, but he does type fast. Post your questions or comments freely. You can do as you want in this chat. Just keep the spam and personal chat between members to a minimum until this is over. Then people can hang out and chat with each other.

If you don't get an answer from him relax. He is one person responding to a full chat room. Please be patient and perhaps he will get to your question or comment.

A transcript of this chat session will be posted in Chat Central immediately following the chat. I'll see you all in the morning.

Chris

"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,for there you have been, and there you will always want to be." -- Leonardo da Vinci


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