Creating a public chat

Public chats is a great way to set up your own personal chat room in a matter of seconds. It's a great way to meet new people who share your interests.

Create your own public chat

To start a public chat go to Tools > Start Public Chat

A wizard will appear and walk you through the steps to create a public chat.

Choose a chat topic

You will be asked to enter a chat topic, which will help other users to see what your chat is about. Remember, the more interesting the chat topic, the more people you're likely to have in your discussion. You can also add a picture to the chat topic if you wish.

If you choose to ‘Lock topic and picture' only you, the host of the chat, can change the chat topic or picture.

Make the rules

You can choose how you wish to run your chat by defining moderation rules such as who can enter the chat and whether they can post messages in the chat. Choose between the following options:

Anyone can post messages — Anyone can join the chat and begin participating straight away.
Participants need permission to start posting — Anyone can join the chat in read-only mode, however before they can post messages the host must authorize them as members.
Participants need permission to start reading and posting — The host must approve all Skype users who wish to join the chat before they can view or post messages.

You can also create community guidelines which will be displayed to all new members explaining the rules and guidelines of the public chat.

Promote your public chat

Promoting your public chat is easy and will help you to build a vibrant community. Simply copy and paste the unique link of your public chat into emails or chats to encourage people to join in your discussion.

You can also promote your public chat in your email signature, on your blog or MySpace page or even on your website using web snippets. To create your unique web snippet click ‘Get code snippets online' and follow the simple on-screen instructions. Once you have the HTML for the web snippet simply add this to your email signature, blog or website to start promoting your public chat.

More info on promoting your public chat

Example of snippets:

Start chatting

Congratulations! You have successfully created your very first public chat. You can now add your existing contacts to the public chat by clicking ‘Add more people to this chat!' and selecting the users you wish to add from your contact list.

How to manage your public chats
How to promote your public chats