Chatwee is a truly versatile platform. With the number of features it offers, it can be used in many different ways. A broad spectrum of sites, as different as churches and day trading firms, use our live chat to keep their audiences engaged. Regardless of the type of community you host, the features I discuss here will help you improve the chatting experience and manage members’ day to day interactions better.
There isn’t a single way for you to use Chatwee. From different display modes, login options, to the communication style – you can decide what suits the needs of your online community best.
At first, the Dashboard may seem a bit overwhelming – you may not be aware of all the different features available there. Without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the options you’ll find handy but probably aren’t using enough of.
1. Full-screen mode
Chatwee offers a link called Direct URL which opens your chat in the full screen mode. You can use it for anchor text or a menu item if you don’t want the default chat bubble to linger in the site’s corner.
To get the link, go to Customize > General > Direct URL
2. Disabling private chats and chat rooms
Depending on the nature of your website, you may want to disable private conversations between users. On the other hand, you may want to keep the chats going, but do away with chat rooms, so that no public discussion is possible.
To adjust the settings, go to Customize > Messages > Private chats and Customize > Messages > Chatrooms respectively.
3. Keeping the discussion clean
Most sites will want to keep the discussion civilized. There are two ways to go about that. You can either replace swear words with asterisks or completely block cussing posts.
In order to decide how clean you want to keep your chat, go to Customize > Privacy > Profanity filter
4. Looking for a particular message by a particular user in a particular room
As a chat admin, you may want to look up people’s postings for a variety of reasons. You being able to do that may act as a deterrent in itself and help keep things in check.
In order to parse the chat content using filters, go to the Messages tab on the left.
5. Chat room management
Go to the Chatrooms tab on the left to:
Rearrange the order of rooms by clicking and dragging them
Set up password-protected rooms
Deactivate rooms without deleting them
Change the name and set a password for an existing room
6. Real time banning
You can use user IPs to ban them in Dashboard, however, when you’re logged in to the chat as a moderator, you can hover your mouse over a user avatar to issue a permanent ban or a 15-minute ban. Easy!
7. Advanced analytics
Click the Analytics tab on the left for an overview of what’s going on in your chat in terms of user activity. There’s a time-based filter too, so you can track how things change over particular periods.
Wrap-up
These are seven of the most underused Chatwee features you should definitely give a try. They concern both the user experience and how you operate the chat as its owner.
Hopefully, you’ll now be able to take full advantage of all the options our live chat offers. Are there any features, not necessarily mentioned in this post, you find particularly useful? What features are crucial to your online community?
Let me know in the comments or tweet me @Chatwee
