Olark as a networking tool

theborski.com

47 points·borski··5 comments

I love chatting with website visitors too, but Olark couldn't handle it. I have around 150 concurrent visitors on my sites during the day. Olark would silently limit the XMPP bots to 25 or 30 people (I found out about that after e-mailing them, it's now mentioned on their pricing page), and get confused and either send me messages from the same person through multiple chat bots or repeat messages that were sent over and over.

I've switched to SnapEngage after doing a live chat with Noah at AppSumo using their widget on that site and love it so far. Rather than try to assign a bot to every visitor currently on my sites, they seem to only assign a bot when a chat is initiated, which works great.

Hi Dan, I think you gave Olark before we had solved some of the issues for larger sites. When your in the 150 visitor range it doesn't make as much sense to let you monitor all your visitors in your buddy list -- so we now let you turn that off and only have slots for chatting visitors. As well as a few more options we've implemented for some of our other larger customers.

I'd be happy to offer you a deal to try us out again, and definitely appreciate your feedback for helping us improve.

I run Olark on my personal blog and ask people to talk to me. I love interacting with the readers and have met a few of them in person.

Come say hello: http://www.johndbritton.com

I thought for a long time about whether or not to post this since I was curious as to whether this would turn into a "tragedy of commons" sort of thing, where the act of posting it changed whether it was still useful.

Yes! Not just Olark though, I've had a similar experience using SnapEngage.

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