Observations

Some things I’d love to see implemented on Streamate:  

 A timeclock in the chat interface.
 
Stats only display the time members left premium chat but not the time they entered. I’d like to see also when they entered. 

Problems:

Stat reports show the member’s display handle, not his account handle. How this presents a problem: Impossible to check earnings in my stats report against the names in my premium chat to see if they match up. Members who stay less than 30 seconds aren’t billed, so try to differentiate between this group and the guys who changed their handle because neither handles are going to appear in my stats. Dog chasing tail.
 

Options?

Open chatroom option. 
 
Members’ text is hidden from the room, by default. They must specify via, ‘make visible to all’ button, for their chat to appear openly. Commonly, chatrooms are the other way around. Some of us like to interact with our members in guest chat and people are more inclined to stay in a room that looks busy than one where the girl just looks busy talking to herself. Since he sees noone else in the room (and too often I encounter this), he shies off and leaves. Sometimes, assumes I am ignoring him, when I’m actually trying to talk to 25 others at the same time. Even if the room appears full, he can sit and watch the flow, enjoy the conversation or join in, at some point, when he figures out what everyone’s talking about. The longer members stay in our rooms, the more they will get to know us. I’d feel tricked if I entered a chatroom, thinking I was alone with someone, when in fact, I wasn’t. Isn’t it a rather awkward feeling to mistake a comment intended for someone else, as one for you? Sure, we could address each individual by (display) name, each time we want to respond to them, so that there’s no confusion, but isn’t that kinda defeating the whole purpose now of making the member think he’s all alone with us? Give us the choice, at least, to offer an open chatroom.

Don’t hide the low-raters!
 
Show us who voted us low. The stats report shows a column that lists our ratings yet nowhere do we see who rated us, even within the member profiles, the Ratings column always shows a hyphen, meaning no rating. I can go back 6 months and if I’m lucky, stumble across a rating of 5 but nothing more recent. It shows I have ratings but nowhere are they to be found. It shows I have had 3 ratings, yet I checked each private and exclusive session for that night and nowhere is it showing that any of these members rated me. I can go to My Ratings, another area in my settings, only to see that someone rated me a 1, yet there too, doesn’t show me who did it. Why can’t I know who rated me a 1? This could be someone who entered my room for the sole purpose of rating me a 1, never used the chat and left. Who would do that? Gee, I don’t know, but let me take a wild guess – a studio pimp or my very own competition, since it’s so easy to do so? This brings my listing on the main page down, so they do have a good reason to want to do this and the few bucks it cost them might in fact, make it worth the effort. 

Let’s say he was an actual random member, who rated me a 1 because I refused to perform an act that he wanted to see. He got upset and left, rating me a 1 for this reason. It would be useful if I could later re-visit that conversation, to see why he rated me a 1. If he had a valid reason or not, since we have no control over them rating us, tell us who’s doing this, as this could ultimately affect our placement on the site and subsequently, our revenue.

Please tweak this tool:

The block feature:

To block a member, I’d rather click on his handle next to his line of text, rather than having to try to catch his handle, which scrolls up and down the list on the right frame every time someone enters or leaves the room, to click and block him. I’m not a gamer and the precision sometimes can be quite a challenge. I’d also like the ability to block the little shit this way after he’s left the room. Why do they have to be present in the room for us to be able to block them? We can’t block them from our stats page, nor can we block them from our mailboxes. I’ve got someone sending me blank e-mails purposely now and I can’t do a damn thing about it, except delete it every time.

Suggestions (to help us better market ourselves):

A red bullet beside a handle if the member has not spent anything in a period of 3 months and a green dollar sign if he’s spent $50.00 or more in my room in total. Guys with no indicator can be newbies or just very small spenders. That’s fine. Give us some indication though, of what kind of spender he is. This does not infringe upon his privacy rights, as I’ve seen other sites do this. It helps us to know where to focus our efforts and by ratio, tells us how well we are doing at retaining customers. In all honesty though, I can’t see this working as long as members are able to change their display handles and that is all we are able to see. When we’re busy in our rooms, greeting guests and keeping 25 conversatons going at once, we really don’t have the time to go clicking every profile to gather this information. You need to give us some tools to work with here.

Members get to see country codes of hosts. Why can’t we see country codes of members (including, and especially of those that don’t spend)? Just the country code. If this isn’t infringing upon OUR privacy, then it certainly doesn’t infringe upon theirs.

I would like some feedback (good or bad) about these ideas, so please don’t be shy to lay them out there. Add your input, suggestions, comments, backlash or stamp of approval on anything in this article. You can post anonymous if you like. Streamate, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading!

Amanda