Community Chats Using Skype

Last weekend, I decided to try Skype public chats on a community that I run. Here’s how it works. You launch your Skype application, under Chat, go to Start Public Chat. Then you’ll receive a wizard-like utility to setup a Skype public chat room. At the end, you are given a button or link you can copy and paste into your emails, web site or blog.

To chat, anyone who has Skype installed simply clicks on the button or link. A new Skype chat window launches and you can start chatting. My community is forum based so having the ability to do live chats without installing yet another script and having to manage it myself is a big selling point for me. Also, having the option for scheduled live chats is nice.

The down side, as a public chat room creator, you cannot leave the chat or what – Skype doesn’t give much documentation on that but I suppose the room would not be available. So definitely not a 24-7 solution but good for scheduled chats. Later, I found out that the latest version (Skype version4) does not support this feature The above instructions is based on Skype version 3 which is what I still have.

After digging around a little bit in the forum, it seems that there is a work around to make this work on both Skype 3 and Skype 4. It is a little more technical in Skype 4 though but if this is something you want to try, here are instructions to set up chat links or buttons on Skype 4.

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