Here is a Skype Room owner secret…

Want to know how to kick inactive Skype chat room members without banning them?

OK, but first some cool insider Skype chat news…

Skype Chat News:

It’s in Skype’s plans to add a command that would print info on chat member activity in any chat to help hosts clean their chats.  That would be nothing short of AWESOME! … to have a / command for room hosts to clean their  Skype  chat rooms.  (In case you haven’t noticed, .. I call Skype public chats “rooms”.) Read below on  how to “vote” for such a cool Skype chat feature.

How to have an active Skype chat room

Skype chat room owners/hosts want active members in their rooms. Being limited to about 150 members, rooms can fill up with in-active members preventing active members from joining. New and active  members improve the quality of  chat discussions. New members as well as active members ask questions and give responses to other member’s posts.  I love active Skype communities! They add good content. This makes for a good chat! So how do we Skype chat owners & hosts remove old inactive members from a chat?

You mean Ban & Eject?

Nope… we have another option, /kick, read on.

We  will occasionally want to “clean house” or prune a Public chat room to only have active members.  In Skype v3.8 there is a menu item when clicking on a person in the room to “Eject & Ban”(not sure about v4 – will check later).  Problem is, other then seeming rather dramatic an action and possibly raising eye brows and questions,  /kick&ban more importantly will prevent them from entering again later should they want to become active or pop in to ask a  relevant question.

After doing a Ban & Eject of people in your Skype chat room, they can not join again unless you add them. True. So here is what you can do… Just kick!

Instead of using Ban & Eject (or / kick&ban), you can  just /kick. If you only kick, they can join by themselves again. If you Ban & Eject ( or / kick&ban), they need to be unbanned before being able to join or be added again. Plus, that means more work & less automation for you, the room owner. Side Note: Most of my Skype rooms can be joined from the list of topic focused rooms here.

Vote for this new Skype feature –

… a chat member activity list command …

I am very much looking forward to the new chat commend to show a list of active or inactive members in a Skype chat.  I hope it automates the removing (/kick) of all inactive members who have not posted in X days. If you are interested in this as well, then do please leave a comment below; Skype may be watching (wink).

a good house cleaning strategy …

Meanwhile,  if you want to purge one of your Skype chats, one option is to look at who has posted a message in last X days, and kick those with no posts. But before kicking, you can send the link to join your chat, with a little explanation message, so if someone discrete wants to remain in the chat, he can just join again.

Send a private re-join link & message to all Skype chat members at once …

First, find out who hasn’t seen the chat recently. Make your list of people that haven’t seen this chat in last 30 days by using the “Show Messages from – last 30 days” link (screenshot needed?).  Then prepare to send a  private broadcast message to all members of the room, or the inactive Skype users if you prefer.

How?

Make a contact group by high-lighting them and dragging them to a new contact group (called category   in Skype v4, I believe). Then, use Message Magic to send the message to all of them at once with a link to join the room. (Need a video showing how to do that? Let me know in the comments below).

But Skype v4 does not allow people to join a chat from the usual link, right? Right, however they can enter with a uri link (works w 4.x users).  So, in case you have some people who have upgraded to Skype v4 who would want to join a room, you can offer a uri link for the room also ( a uri will look like  skype:?chat&blob= followed by all the blob= numbers). I will do a separate post on that with a video if there is enough interest (leave a comment if you want that), and here is the UberOverlord’s Skype forum post explaining how to use Skype v4 friendly Skype chat room links.

Does that help?

Remember…

I love making you all Skype video tutorials on anything you want to see, so let me know if you need me to make a video.

I hope that helps you Skype chat room owners or hosts keep your rooms active and healthy.

Bye for now.

PS My Message Magic links will soon be changing, so if you want to get this Skype add on tool for both private skype broadcast messages to groups (or in mass) or for looking for leads and sending invite messages (again in mass to many), then please… Skype me or call me (360-275-7856 or tool free US / Canada 800-566-2823)  for this new  3×7 MM link, a better link (for a better income opportunity/money making option) with this amazingly useful Skype tool.