Thanks, Kevin. I wasn't sure if it was this that I'd seen before.

Merlin's a real cutie ... but if we could select which character we wanted to pre-install for this, it would let us customize this hack even better to suit the topic/subject of our forums.

i do like it,be geat if it worked for other browsers

So far feedback has been positive on this guy. I agree though, my FireFox users cannot see him.

same here,it certainly livens up recieveing a PM,most of my user use firefox

Great. A promotion of one of the most proprietary things you can possibly put on a web site. :down:

[high]* TCM doesn't install.[/high]

Nice idea in my opinion, despite the fact that merlin is not a under the GNU License ;). What would happen if I load a forum that has this installed under linux? Maybe the coder should find a character that is internet based or something and would not require additional program installed on their computers or certain OS to be used.

An idea would possibly be SitePal. Even though it's quite expensive to run anything like this IMO.

Love the idea though ;)

Merlin and other MS Agents are client based, not server based, so it doesn't matter what OS the server is, it only matters what OS the client browsing the server is using. The delivery package for the code is typically either JS or VBS and it's included in your HTML like any other bit script code would be; when the client's browser then receives that code it's up to the clients browser to determine what to do with it.

If the moon & stars are aligned correctly (the client's OS is a Windows machine that has the particular agent pre-installed along with a Text To Speech [TTS] engine) then the agent will appear as expected otherrwise it's a 'take-your-pick' scenario as to what will happen with the client viewing the page.

In regards to the GNU license, the MS Agents are free to download & use on any licensed Windows client. ;) Remember, the server isn't pushing the Merlin character down to the client, it is only sending code that will activate an already installed Merlin.

I believe it would only work on Windows 2000 and greater OS, though it is possible other OS' have equivalents they most likely would not be called in the same manner (no experience with this).

I bet it'll only work on Win2k (supposing they didn't uninstall that annoying Agent thingy like I did) with Internet Explorer, it's a nice thing but I'd rather see it as a javascript that runs in the client and changes messages and such.

Mine works as described, except that the message is not spoken with a voice. It displays in a balloon with some other sounds. So sound is not the issue.