Chat Room Updates

[Kiwi]

With IRC you just double click on a link and your browser can open up solving the picture issue.

The other one to consider is Ensign Software'd EChat which does include pictures and moderation is easy. Ask Howard; he seems pretty open to anyone using it.

[atto]

	Quote:	Soultrader
	I really dont see any issue with the current chat room... were you getting timed out yesterday?

Occasionally. In my opinion, it's a little clumsy, but I can live with it.

It may be my browser, but when a new AJAX request is made (when someone sends a message, for instance), if I was typing in the chatbox, it then loses focus, causing it to stop typing. If I press Backspace in the time, it brings the browser back a page.

[Soultrader]

	Quote:	Kiwi
	With IRC you just double click on a link and your browser can open up solving the picture issue. The other one to consider is Ensign Software'd EChat which does include pictures and moderation is easy. Ask Howard; he seems pretty open to anyone using it.

The problem with Ensign is it requires installation as a stand alone software. This is not an option at the moment as it does not attract members to use it and also without the integration of the chat room script with the forum, I am not too fond of using it.

I need somthing integrated, otherwise moderating will be messy tryig to track unwanted users or banned users.

[firewalker]

	Quote:	Soultrader
	Please let me know if you experience this problem again. I am shopping around for another chat room script which I may implement after hearing some additional feedback. I dont want to jump to conclusions yet as a new script may just lead to similar issues. Thanks.

It's odd ST... some days it happens every 15-30 minutes, on other days it happens once. Last week I had it once in a 4-5 hour chat session. Yesterday it was much more troublesome. Perhaps because there were more people in the room, I dunno...

Anyhow, I think the concept is good, and I don't think you need to overhaul everything or start from scratch. IRC was more popular 5-10 years ago, but it has it's limitations too. The great advantage of this chatroom is you can just click from within the TL site and get aboard immediately.

[Hlm]

	Quote:	Soultrader
	According to the developer: "The timeout is a network issue and not related to the chat. if you keep your mouse over the tiny icon [bottom, left] you'll see PHP/SQL execution: 0.001 sec - that's the chat on your server and Latency: 0.050s - that's the network. internet is not the perfect network environment. when your browser requests something from internet it goes through many hosts and finally it appears on your screen. it is possible any of these hosts to slow down and even drop your request. it is normally to happen from time to time since internet is not perfect so that the closer the server is, the better."

Exactly...this is why some people have lots of trouble while others have none. It depends on your ISP and how many hops it takes (and their reliability) to get there. This path can change often or very little. Also, Firefox does appear to work slightly better but this is because of how its programmed. Firefox naturally tries harder to make that connection (or so I have been told).

As for not being able to access the site after some disconnections, that has happened to me as well. It's almost like the site is viewing you as an intruder (DOS Attack) and temporarily disables your connection from the server. Of course that is a complete guess.

Overall it seems to have been better lately. However, I have only been on about twice a week for the last few weeks. It could also have to do with how my current ISP is or that I am now using Firefox 3. So in other words...it might mean nothing.

[cowpip]

I looked at implementing IRC at one time in the past for my own business web site. If your server is linux based, there are free IRC servers you can choose from, which can be self-contained (i.e. not communicate with the rest of the IRC network), or you can choose to integrate it into an IRC network.

You might rather choose to create your own channel on an existing IRC network. It's easy to do and you can set up a bot that will maintain control of the channel even if no one is around. Moderation and banning is simple and can be tiered, and you wouldn't need to expose your server's precious cpu-time to it. It also has file-sharing capabilities between clients and can even be set up to provide server-like characteristics (i.e., you can type "dir" to get a listing of contents in a folder, or "cd" to choose a specific folder to navigate to while in this mode). That aspect requires a bit of extra setup (I'm not real familiar with that aspect of setup, but I have used those types of servers).

One nice thing about IRC is that it can easily support more people than you can shake a stick at - without much difficulty. Hundreds of people can be on one channel - thousands if you include many channels.

Anyway, I personally think IRC is probably one of the best solutions for real-time chats. It's been around for years and is time-tested. My only caveat is that people make sure they use a secure client to access IRC.

It's definitely a thought worth considering if your existing chat script is insufficient.

[erierambler]

Not sure if this information helps you or not, but since using Firefox, I have had minimum problems. In the chatroom for more than a week and only yesterday could not stay in for some reason. I switched computers ( have another with router ) and no problem for the rest of the day.
erie