It has come to my attention that the public chat has become more and more of a place for users to watch the topics that they bring to mention rather than discuss them. While this may be solely my fault for this occurrence, I can offer a suggestion that would satisfy both parties (that is, the staff and the players). Please keep in mind with this disclaimer that the idea was not originally mine. Another user brought this to mention and I don't believe he created a thread about it on the forums to show he was serious about it. So, here I am suggesting we create two separate chat channels for the server that can be changed with a command. I'm computer illiterate, so I can't necessarily explain how it'd work. I r dum. For the second channel, there would be no staff to monitor it and there could be a disclaimer to pop up : "WARNING: The chat you are about to enter is not supervised and may contain offensive material. Are you sure you'd like to continue?" To which the user would type Yes / No. Make sense? No? Probably not - I'm terrible at explaining things. </rant>
All chats will be monitored we are not having one that's sectioned off as people can post links that shouldn't, advertise and have conversations that should not be had... eg recruiting, sexual, harassment, abuse.. so if a new channel is ever placed in mods-admins will still need to monitor / see it. private chats can still have this however if a user reports things we take action.
Private chat is a good option... but wouldn't work for multiple people... unless I'm missing something. Say 3-5 people wanted to carry on a conversation about a topic that maybe the 2-3 others people in public chat are uninterested in... albeit not offensive. A way to have private group chat, still monitored by staff/mod might fit this request. I know I've seen such functions available (one depends on which hotbar slot a particular item is held in) just not sure if this would necessarily be a priority item/function for the server. Just my 2 cents...
Im not sure how hard it would be to implement this, but I think it would be nice to have a feature where any player could create a chat channel and invite others to it through commands, with moderators able to see all channels and speak within them. It would allow for people to talk more freely about what they wish and help those who are building in groups of more than two while still allowing moderators to keep an eye on advertising, harassment, etc. Edit: I have seen people discussing religion, and other topics that others are sensitive to or do no want to hear. This would be a great way to allow people to have these discussions apart from the general chat so as to not make others uncomfortable