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Just to thank you for the pm. As said, if I can think of any other reason, then I will pm you.
All the best,
Belle
I propose 2 Support Chat rooms, not just the one at present. Each room should have a minimum of three mods, thereby allowing everyone the chance to be given support. Instead, Support Chat could have as many as 15 coming in between 8 PM and 9:30 PM making the room totally overcrowded.
So, this is the dream for us. Ideally we would have this exact setup - having enough mods to support another chat room would be amazing! In reality though, reaching even close to the amount of volunteers that would take across the week is impossible from where we are right now. This is a long term plan that we'd like to strive for, but in the forseeable future we'll be sticking to one room. The amount of mods we have will steadily increase though. :yes:
I hope it helped to get this out somewhere - I know it can be pretty frustrating when you can't get your voice heard and/or chat feels a little hectic. Although it sounds like this chat was particularly crazy!
In the perfect scenario, group chat is a place where people come to give support as well as seek it for themselves. Ideally, this means that everyone gives a bit of support and also gets what they need from the session, meaning you guys take care of each other rather than moderators being the only ones giving support. That being said, though, that certainly isn't how it always turns out and people certainly aren't obligated to give support if they don't want to or aren't feeling up to it.
A side-effect of this is that, sometimes, not everyone gets what they want from the session, and people can leave a bit unsatisfied. This is okay - it happens and there's no real way to avoid it with a group environment like Support Chat. Sometimes, it can pay to say to ourselves "maybe it's just not my night, I'll try again another day". It sounds like making the decision to leave was the best one for you that night, so well done for making that call.
If you find yourself consistently not feeling comfortable in chat because of the fast pace, there are a few other options you can try. Have you ever been to one of our Support Circles? These are essentially Support Chats with a much smaller group, where everyone takes it in turns to talk (so it's much slower paced). If you're interested, you can sign up here. Our next one is on Tuesday.
If you'd prefer a more 1-2-1 style of chat rather than a group environment, you could also try 7cupsoftea. These guys have their own listeners that you can talk to as well as some group chats too. Again, not sure if this is up your street, but thought I'd mention them.
In the meantime, of course, feel free to come to Support Chat any time. Although we don't have a chat cap any more, that's something we can look into once we've settled with this new software if we sense a real calling for it. I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say we'll do our best to make the atmosphere as supportive as possible, even when it's really busy. :yes:
Thanks again for the feedback, and I hope this helped!
Mike
I've save the 7cupsoftea link. That looks most enocouragng and goodness knows I need additional help at this time since Mum died, but family issues remain.
I think a different chat environment would be more helpful to me though I am please Belle has comfortably settled into your's. I did visit Support Circle and found it helpful, but I guess it largely depends who also is there and whether or not one gets on with them. I think I'll pass of Support Chat for the time being, thanks. Belle is more likely to need that chat group which she has said had been helpful to her recently.
I'm glad you found my feedback helpful.
Happy new year!
Julie
I thought I'd drop in here with an update on where we are with the software right now.
We're currently making a note of all the issues you guys report to us, and investigating the ones we're able to investigate. At the moment though, we don't have much resource to fix bugs or change things, so we're working through problems far slower than we'd like. This sucks a bit, because it means you folks are raising things with us that we may not be able to look into right away.
In the short term, we'll probably keep suggesting that people use Chrome because we've found that to be pretty much bug-free. We're aware this really isn't ideal because for some of you it will mean downloading a new browser purely to come to chat, but realistically it's the best we can suggest at the moment.
Again, please do keep telling us if you find any issues because it is helpful for us to be aware of them, but keep in mind that we may not have much in the way of solutions for the time being, and if you notice that a bug you reported ages ago hasn't been fixed, that doesn't mean we've ignored it.
You've all been very patient with this transition, so thank you to everyone for bearing with us!
Mike & the team :rainbow::rainbow2: