I don't think it's very helpful or constructive to say that "people are leaving the site" because of an occasional technical issue or problem loading a page.
We last replaced the servers with brand new ones at the end of 2017. So they are a year and a half old, too new to be looking to replace again this year. We don't have a budget to replace the community servers (it uses two) any more than every three years.
Chat is the cause of most of the problems related to the server. It is a super-intensive resource hog and everything we've tried to help with it has not helped. We've brought in outside consultants. Nothing has helped. We've spent considerable time and resources troubleshooting it, to no avail.
In short, we're left with very few good options. As usual, there are no really good chat products available that don't have similar problems (or other issues). Chat needs to work as well on mobile as it does on the forums, and integrate with our existing user database. This eliminates many products on the market.
We'll continue to research the options, but in the meantime, we're doing the best we can with the limited resources we have to work with. Sorry.
__________________
Don't throw away your shot.
|