Flexible styles of moderation and routing
The image above shows a special kind of moderation from the moderators point of view. In this view, the chat window consists of three parts. In the top third chat between moderators and experts takes place, in the bottom third all other users are allowed to speak freely. The middle part is only to be seen in the moderators and experts view of the chat, it's non-existent for normal users. That area holds all incoming questions and allows moderators assign those to to an expert who he thinks is able to give an answer. The experts themselves also are able to re-route questions back to the pool (or to another expert) in case they don't know an answer to a specific question but think someone else might. 
This is the same chat window, but this time from a users perspective: Besides being able to chat freely with other users, one may also directly submit a question to the above mentioned pool by pressing the "Ask"-button - the question will then be send to the queue until a moderator assigns it. A confirmation is given back to the user. As soon as am expert answers that question, both the question and its answer will show up in the upper third of the screen and therefore then be part of the "official" conversation. As you can also see in the figure above, moderators and experts also are able to insert illustrative material directly into the chat. To save space the list of active users is placed into a separate browser window.
| |||
|
© Computerman GmbH 1999-2007 | |||