Chat Etiquette for Livewire Online 💬
Chatrooms are a great way to meet new people, crack your best joke and talk about all things exciting! When using a chatroom, there are a few important things to remember:
Introduce yourself: Just like walking into a room full of unfamiliar faces, it can be daunting to introduce yourself. But don’t be shy!
Ask questions: Not only does this make everyone feel included but it can spark great conversation. Often, great conversations come from the simplest questions. Asking people how their day was, what their favorite TV show or favorite food is, is a great way to make everyone feel included and start up a conversation.
Always treat others how you want to be treated: Remember that online chatting is still a form of communication. It’s just like talking to someone face-to-face. Sometimes people think that because they are behind a computer screen, it’s okay to make hurtful comments. This is definitely not true. In fact, we need to be even more careful with our words. This is because as we only have words to go off, we are unable to see the persons face or understand their tone of voice. This can make it easy to misinterpret what others are saying. If you are ever unsure or feel that someone is not treating you quite right, message the Livewire Facilitator. That’s what they are there for! Not only will they be able to explain the situation which you may have misinterpreted, they’ll also provide great guidance 😊
Welcome newcomers into the conversation: Remember when you were a ‘newbie’ and how you felt when you were joining the chat for the first time? Were you nervous, scared or intimidated? Others are probably feeling that too, so welcome them into the conversation and help ease their nerves. This will make them feel included and show them just how great the Livewire community really is.
BRB: Need to go? No problem! Just post ‘BRB’ (be right back) or change your chat icon to busy. This will let others know others know that you’re not responding to messages because you’re not at your computer or busy doing something else, not because you are bored or disinterested.
Livewire Community Standards: A friendly reminder that all Livewire members must abide by the community standards. This can be found by clicking on this link.
A Note on Using Caps (all capital letters).
When it comes to expressing ourselves in text form, typing in Caps can help us to make it super clear that something is exciting or frustrating. And we are all about people expressing themselves! But we thought we would fill you in on some things that we have learned about using Caps.
Here is what we know:
- If a member on Livewire uses a screen reader to read the text in chat or on the newsfeed, each time someone writes a word in all caps, the screen reader reads that word out letter by letter, instead of as whole word. As you can imagine, this takes ages, but it also makes it harder for people using screen readers to understand what’s being said and keep up with the conversation.
- When a lot of people are using caps, or there is lots of caps lock being used by one person, it can make the chat a bit overwhelming to be part of if a) you are a new member trying out chat for the first time, or b) you interpret caps lock as yelling, and as a result feel a bit intimidated and not keen on staying in chat- that’s definitely not what we want.
- If caps is being used to get a point across or to be noticed in a conversation, this becomes a problem as well. We don’t want you to feel like you have to use caps to be heard, or get your point across, because everyone should be heard on Livewire. If you feel like you aren’t being heard in chat or across the Feed, let us know and we can help you out.
As you can see, even using caps in an excited way can cause accessibility problems for some of our members.
At the same time, we don’t want to ban using Caps! One word in Caps, here and there, for excitement purposes, is just fine. It’s when Caps is being used a lot, or for multiple words or sentences.
And yep, we know- the Facilitators have a tendency to do this a lot too! We are making a concentrated effort to find other ways to express ourselves without using Caps.
And that is what we would like you to do, too. We know everyone on Livewire is passionate about making the site as friendly and accessible as it can be possibly be. Which is why we thought we would give you this information about Caps, and you can decide what to do with it from here.
That’s all, Folks!
We hope you enjoy using the chatroom and we look forward to getting to know you when you next join the conversation 🙂
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