On the forum there has been a lot of discussion about using a shoutbox on your website.

First of all, what is a shoutbox?

Wikipedia tells us:



A shoutbox is essentially nothing more than a guestbook or comment type kind of feature. It could also be called an (extremely) simple forum.

You can add a shoutbox to a specific page, and it will only update the shoutbox on that page. Or a shoutbox could be organized in different rooms, where people can chat, real time or not, about the topic of the room.

The description says that people can leave messages in a shoutbox without registering with the site, but in truth, a webmaster can set up a comment or forum feature that doesn't require the user to register either.

Comments

There are better and more modern solutions to the shoutbox: comments allow your users to add their thoughts to your post, reply to each other and see their comments appear real time on the website. It is in effect a chat application for your website in the form of commenting. Because the comments are directly related to the blog post, they add value, and allow discussion about the topic. Because people can select a specific comment and decide to just reply to that comment, it is superior to a simple shoutbox. You can literally have a discussion within a discussion, where the discussion about a specific comment becomes a thread of its own.

Guestbook

A guestbook is an outdated way to leave comments about an entire site or brand. Visitors can find a page where they can paint 'some graffiti on that wall'. Guestbooks have their use for that reason. Guestbooks are a simple way for visitors to say 'I was here and this was my experience'. You don't see guestbooks very often anymore, because comments offer more targeted conversations and forums allow people to pick a topic and discuss just that topic. The topical focus of the conversation makes the conversation more enjoyable and interesting.

We've already briefly touched on the forum. A forum can be organized in topics and subtopics, and as said above, this allows for targeted conversations and does not need to require a user to be registered to contribute to the conversation.

Chat

There is also the possibility to offer your website users to chat on the site. This is where the shoutbox comes in strong: chats are generally not saved; a shoutbox retains all the conversations that went before. The reasons why community organizers and webmasters implement chat over shoutbox type features is that with shoutbox, because it retains all the conversations, it becomes another channel that needs to be monitored. There are users that abuse the shoutbox feature and leave all types of nonsense. The website owner would then be obliged to check all chats and look for abuse. There is nothing wrong with the transient nature of a chat, which allows users to communicate freely without storing that information indefinitely.

Conclusion: should you be using a shoutbox on your site?

If you can find a good use for it, by all means. But in all honesty, the shoutbox is a feature from the 90's that simply does not compete with more modern and better structured features such as nested comments, forums and transient chat.

A visual example of a shoutbox:

I personally don't miss having a shoutbox, and I tend to think of them as something that appeals to the younger crowd that texts each other a lot. I'm not part of that.

But I'm sure it could be a feature that would play well to some demographics.

Shout boxes are great, as long as you don't also have a blog, or do not need to generate direct communications with potential clients.

People tend to use the handiest tool to communicate opinions or questions. Blog comments that end up in a shout box aren't as useful as those attached to the blog entries themselves, IMHO.

Questions asked and answered in shout boxes seems a bit unprofessional, and may reduce your potential client base.

Eeek! another thing you have to moderate!
No sir! Not for me.
However, if you're running a tight community site and trust your readership, I don't see why not. They're a lot of fun.

I actually like having a comment in your site. It gives the user a way of expressing about an article or a product anything they see in the site. It also gives one a quick perception of the kind of people visiting your site and also what they like or not like.

Comments on a blog are great. I highly recommend them. But better to structure them as traditional comments than as a shoutbox.

Comments can be nested, so that people can have discussions within discussions. Shoutboxes lack this feature and are clumsy for that reason.