Chat room for big board?
 

What do you suggest?

Here is one month of visit stats

Forum has 1,300 on line at one time as a max figure

Moderated guest chats would be good,could have as many as 200 in for one off 'special VIP guests' chat sessions...? But day to day chat probably 50 on line max?

Multi language is of interest

Things to watch out for?

Too risky, will slow server? Just forget chat?

Chat does slow the server. We upgraded our server so our members could chat. We use the flashchat. But we find that we don't get more than about 40ppl tops in the chat room at any given time, and we have 12K members and about 1800 who are on at some point in the day every day on average.

you may want to look at IRC or a hosted solution for that big of a crowd. I have over 10.4k members.

I used flash chat, but I only have 10-12 people in the chatroom max

I use flashchat but would skip to another solution that can handle larger numbers of chatters and has more functionality, if I can find a good one. So far 123flashchat (a different solution than flashchat) seems good, but not optimal and extremely expensive. Tips would be nice.
I have 30K of members/ 5K active members. 120K unique visitors.

i got 7k+ members and i just use either vbshout v3 or a nice new one called inferno vbshout lite which is quite good! other than those all i can recommend is use Flashchat v4?

with vbshout v3 you can restrict who can view or use it and also make it bigger on the screen...

im yet to find better!

Spinifex.

I'd stay away from flash chat.. i've seen some big boards using jIRC scripts.. personally if ur board can handle mgc chat box on 30 second refreshes and 5 min timeout i think its win.

ive got 30,000 users with a few hundred on most of the time and almost nobody ever uses the chat. we use flashchat, i think the most ive ever seen in the chat is like 10 people.

Stick with Irc.

Exactly. Besides, it won't eat up all the bandwidth that you've got.

As google talk has implemented Jabber into their sites and have connected this with Yahoo, MSN and AIM, is there no posibility to do the same?

This sort of solution is largely user-to-user communication; I haven't seen Jabber deployed on a web site to encourage chat "rooms" in the sense that multiple users can congregate in the same chatspace.

I'm using inferno shoutbox pro, my users enjoy it more then the chatroom (I had intalled last time) which hardly got used, and I have 110 000+ members on my site. Server load is good, and the instant refresh is great.

Use an IRC chat, it weeds out alot of what you would not want around.

Don't use FlashChat, it takes about 15 concurrent connections to bog down your mysql server!

Don't listen to what anyone says about IRC. IRC is and has always been a MAJOR security risk if you host it yourself. It's not very user friendly and will not be very appealing to your novice computer users.

I recommend VolanoChat. www.volano.com VolanoChat is 100% Java and is benchmarked to handle 30,000 simultaneous connections while not affecting performance at all! If you decide to go with VolanoChat Pro, i'll give you my integration script (free of charge), which has a fully featured backend, usergroup based permissions and works with the vB language module. Everything that's customizable in VolanoChat, i have integrated into my script.

That's absolute nonsense. IRC is *not* a security risk. Also it is extremely user-friendly if you use an applet, then no-one has to install third-party software. I would 100% reccommend using it for any size forum to be honest, as the only overhead you have is your applet. I agree that third-party software is generally overwhelming for your average john smith, but as long as you have the applet or whatever on your site, it's no different to having FlashChat or anything like that, except your server doesn't bear the bruteforce of the IRC protocol traffic. I wouldn't reccomend hosting your own IRC server, but instead I'd reccomend using a big network like Quakenet or Linknet, where you can own your own chat rooms, instead of Efnet which is entirely open.

IRC is really the ONLY solution you have, as many have said.

Flashchat is fine for small numbers (up to about 25/30 users depending on your server capability). I wouldn't recommend it for higher numbers (the later versions use a caching system than helps on the mysql side, but even so, the number of http requests can strain a busy web server).

I started this topic regarding realchat which looks professional, clean and stable (java). No one has responded.

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=156648

spend the doe and get VolanoChat Pro. It's the choice of the US Goverment and many of the best universities around the world. you'll have a lot less headaches with it.

looks like our MisterPopularity is sold to Volano... but he have great budgets here...

when you have no budget, use IRC... if you have budget, use locally served internal network chats like Volano for sure, as you are controling everything...

but you have no budget, so install the eggdrop and play with irc!

Has anyone used sigmachat? (it looks like they changed the name to addonchat. )

I used it a long time ago and I am thinking of using it again in the future.

Any thoughts on that? Likes? Dislikes?

You could try http://www.userplane.com/ too! They have integration and the chat is free if you post their ads! Very nice platform and its hosted :)

I have been using addonchat for about a year and I like it. I use their professional plus package which cost 125 per year. you can compare packages here http://www.addonchat.com/features.html .
Pros(that i can think of):

• Integrates with vb easily
  
• nothing is hosted on your site
  
• allows for remote authentication scripts which Lets you assign specific specific permissions based off of usergroups.
  
• easy to use
  
• automatically emails me transcripts once a day
  
• Auto login for signed in users
  
• lets you add custom emoticons as well as custom chat/event sounds
  
• I personally have not experienced any down time

Cons(that i can think of):

• support is some times a little slow in responding but have only used it once or twice.

I would recommend it.

Yes chat software CAN work on big boards
Its been already listed :)

You are forgetting the possibilities Jabber offers. And this includes connecting to ICQ, MSN, AIM and much more.
Actually, it can. Jabber conferences is the same as chat. And you can host your own Jabber service and add Jabber clients to html page and you can show users in the conference on a html page. So the possibilities are there.

See here for more information:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=158591

I know this is a late response but I have been using it for years. I just upgraded to 3.7rc2 and tied out Flashchat real quick and don't like the additional load levels I am getting with it so I am going back. I think Addonchat is probably the best bet for big boards that want a non IRC solution. It is hosted by them and has plenty of features.

So what do you think about this?