I just moved to flashchat from vb chat. I had a lot of problems with vbchat eating posts and what not.

I started with VB chat, and though it was easy and integrated, it was not speedy enough for my users. I went to flash chat, and it looks great, and has lots of features- also integrates easily with the forum, but it bogs down and starts spitting up at around 7 users at my place. not sure if it is a server side issue or not. I still prefer it though, and for 5 dollars you can't complain LOL

We've had 20 users in before it started to slow. Apparently the user list was part of the problem and this is addressed in flashchat 4.1.2. I still would be surprised if the average server coped with more than 30/40.

There is also the option in 4.1.2 to use a seperate dedicated TCP channel (other than http on port 80) which would improve its performance - but this is a bit fiddly to get going, and also excludes people who can only use http connections.

Is flashchat and vbchat the ONLY chat programs to use?
I run a professional photography forum/gallery, I'd like to have a professional looking chat program for members and something that is very easy for them that we can also save the chat transcript.
We had our first chat session, FlashChat was VERY slow. We had 44 members in chat, and I know we'll have more as it becomes a bi-weekly thing.
Anything else out there? I can use?

TIA!

IRC is the only chat medium I would use for large meetings. It's free and will run on anything (server and client side), if you can't supply your own server you can register a channel on many open servers and large irc networks.

You can tie all this into the forum with a java applet made to work with irc like we use here (there are a few released in the forum). You can also pass along the server details and channel name to your users, your advanced users will like this because they can use an irc client (program on their computer) to connect and chat.

Logging can be done with many of the advanced client programs and/or a bot if you want to get fancy.

IRC requires your users to learn a few commands, but for the newbies a java appelt is enough to get them started as most of them are rather friendly with the buttons and what not ;).

FlashChat is a hell of a lot better!!!

where can i get flash chat :)

<a href="http://www.tufat.com/s_flash_chat_chatroom.htm" target="_blank">http://www.tufat.com/s_flash_chat_chatroom.htm</a>

I like vbchat, but it's the only one i have on my site. One problem noted is that it is very buggy. It kick's you off for no reason and it doesn't allow you to type very fast, so having a conversation is fairly hard to do.

Just my .02, hotwheels