Chat

[Cooler]

Should we keep the chat facility on the site as it is due for renewal. Is it worth the cost?

[Freeform]

Yeah, what else I'm I going to do after work on a Friday night!

Gotta wonder what Andy Murrays up to at that time of night? :D

Col

[Fergie Boy]

Hey! there's chat room, never noticed that before.

[waya]

If we can push it more and get members using it yes, if it's not going to be used much there are much cheaper (ie: FREE) ways to setup a chat room.

[Melanie]

I guess we haven't been using it much lately but remember the evenings are much nicer now and people are getting out the house more, however, during those winter months it was fairly busy in there. I think we should keep it unless Waya can get the FREE alternative up and running before the renewal is up. (Well volunteered Waya :D)

[Andy Murray]

See the skills of Super Mod in action, bending her minions to do her bidding :D He He He

Can't get people in chat cos there is so much activity on the board in general right now.....or is it cos they're all playing Space Invaders in the Arcade? Hmmmmmmm

I'm with Mel n Waya. Look at a free option. The chat room was always glitchy anyway!

[Sweeet]

Cooler, I can hook you up with a free chat applet - infact, your choice of many of them that are just as good if not better.

Really, they're not hard to find at all, you'd have to know how to install either a java applet or a small php/perl script depending on which script you pick. (Unless you requisition me to help :P).

So yes, the chat is good (although I've only ever used it once or twice) but no, it's not worth the cost :p

[Saz]

I like the chat feature, but I don't use it often. Its something I could live without on the site, but I'd be all for a free version of a chat room, if possible.

[morphus]

I'd like to keep it - but we should make better use of it.

[waya]

Even without one of the free applets, there are alot of self hosting programs that are fairly easy to run that licensing doesn't have to be renewed on. I'll start doing some digging and see what I come up with that looks worth trying.

[hongkongfuey]

Sounds like free chat is the way to go!

If someone points me in the direction of a good free one, I'll set it up pronto.

[pesilat]

Here's one possibility. It's phpMyChat. I've played with it a little and it seems pretty nice.

Also, if you're interested, I've got a modification I made for it to enable file uploads within the chat so people can share files with each other.

And if you're a PHP programmer, you could, theoretically, put all sorts of other nice features into it.

http://www.phpheaven.net/rubrique4.html

Mike

[Saz]

Thats a good idea pesilat. If other members know Php, the source code could be put up on the site, and we could modify it to make our own chat room.

[hongkongfuey]

pesilat - sorry for the late reply.

Looks really good - have had a quick look this evening. Will try to get something up and running this week if possible - certainly by next week.

It looks like it has an ability to log chat transcripts into the MySql database - is this the case?

[pesilat]

Originally posted by hongkongfuey
pesilat - sorry for the late reply.

Looks really good - have had a quick look this evening. Will try to get something up and running this week if possible - certainly by next week.

It looks like it has an ability to log chat transcripts into the MySql database - is this the case?

Yup. Not only does it have that ability, but that's how it functions (though it can use a couple of other types of DBs). It tracks everything in the DB.

One really nice (IMO) feature is that the last 20 or so entries will automatically display when someone logs into the room. This means that when I go into a chat in progress, I can read the last chunk of posts so can usually get some idea of what's being discussed.

It doesn't keep chat messages forever. It automatically deletes them after a set number of hours that is set in the inital configuration.

But it would be relatively simple to add a "report to mods" feature so that the current chat could be saved for mod review. (Or something similar to this).

Mike

[hongkongfuey]

Mike - fantastic - will implement by end of next week.