Maybe Baron could work with the Sponsors to offer daily prizes -- free month of software or whatever -- for the best chat posts.
This forum is a business for Baron...it puts money in his pocketbook. Therefore, a "dead chat room" or quiet chat room would look negative (inactive) to sponsors. That may scare some sponsors away although the forum itself is active. You would also need someone to moderate the chat room or someone to be in the chat room 24/7 considering many traders at this forum trade foreign markets. Simply, not possible to moderate the chat room 24/7 unless there are multiple moderators...some for the North American markets and other moderators for Asia markets and others for European markets. Chat rooms don't survive without moderators and nasty folks kicked out usually come back to the forum vindictive and causing all kind of problems for other regular forum members even if the forum members aren't using the chat rooms. I've seen such happen twice when Baron had the chat rooms. Any chat room can survive if it has only a few active members that gets along with each other and a few moderators when the trouble makers show up (they will show up). Unfortunately, even with ET forum size...that's hard to find especially with today's other social media options that allows traders to communicate in real-time with their buddies. Also, there's been a few members that started their own chat room with other ET members...those members quickly found out about the moderator problem and their chat rooms soon became problematic and too difficult to manage even though folks promise to behave themselves.
Baron solution was to get rid of the problem (chat room) although I'm sure some wanted him to find a different solution to the problems.
maybe baron should promote an elitetrader hashtag on twitter that members can use. Would be good publicity for the site on twitter as well.
ET doesn't need more publicity. The problem at the core, in my opinion, is dishonesty and misalignment of goals. Far too many posters on here aren't posting to genuinely share knowledge with those who genuinely want to receive knowledge. I can respect at least those guys who say flat out that they aren't giving anything away, but this opens up the door to just being able to say anything, make outrageous claims, and have absolutely nothing on the line. Most aliases here don't actually trade, or they aren't profitable, are completely delusional, or they are actually scamming. As wrbtrader points out, for Baron, this is a business, and it seems that its better business to let anyone post anything, rather than try to maintain a certain integrity level of posters. As long as a person doesn't swear and harass, anything goes. Simply put, only come to ET once you know how to trade and then get in on the fun.
a good chatroom would take off if the participants would actually call a trade or two stop talking about women posting pics of women posing etc. i'm all for that! when the market is open it's WORK TIME