They have to be on your list and you have to be on their list to use this.

and for chat with a member not in my f list ?

Hey all,
I am the guy who originally wrote bbmessenger with Carl, as Carl will confirm.

bbmessenger was originally for Carl's site, but during development Carl decided it would be nice to release it to the community, so we took on the comprimise of running it via continutally polling mySQL to make up for the lack of widespread PHP process communication systems. This comprimise, however processor heavy, let it run on shared hosts. The combination of javascript, problems with proxies, and this troubled me. You cannot do multi user chat via these methods.

We then set about to modify an open source Jabber(tm) server to authenticate off vBulletin, which I seem to remember was a PHP file and about 100 lines of extra C to the core jabber server. I think there are screenshots of a client further back in this thread running off this setup, with username boardusername@domainname.com which Carl posted. This solved the problems of connections, proxies, etc. but required the user to download a client. I am aware there are bbmessenger type clients for Jabber, but they are also processor intensive. Running a jabber server requires a shell account where you can set the server going and forget about it.

I like this solution, but I would like to propose another:

I am currently considering rewriting bbmessenger, this time as a Java client and server pair. This would need you to run a server process on your hosting or shell account. The client would be more compatible than the javascript version, as Java is a lot more standardised than javascript (no DOM/IE/layers problems). Java is not HTML, so the possibilities for changing the style are limited without digging into source code, but it is possible to allow for changing colours and images. I can see this realistically taking two to three months to do, as I am a very busy guy, but I can see the rewards being great, I am thinking group chat etc.

any... comments? ;)

nice post tom, as i said on msn i personaly feel java is better because the jabber frontend clients are somewhat basic and look poo where with java it can be made nice and be able to let people make it match its colours.

if we could pull abit of vb's css to make up the colours ot the client and then a editable image file for the use of the persons site logo/banner.

if my opinion counts, I would like to suggest staying with Jabber. The clients can be customized easily and running a jabberd is easy as well. Java clients as you said cannot be customized a lot in their look and feel.
PLUS .. there is an option to churn out an integrated IM client which does vbulletin messaging as well as others (AOL, MSN, etc). The open source clients already do all that. We just need to provide back end connectivity to VB.

just my 2 pennies ..

C.Birch I looked around a jabber server to download and install it to my server but there are plenty of them and I don't know which one I have to download and install. Is it possible for you to write which jabber server ?

jabberd2 works well.

can you direct me to how install this??

download http://jabberstudio.org/projects/jab...d-2.0b3.tar.gz and follow all the instructions, :ninja:

I vote for java.... :nervous: