Whats the best Chatroom to install
 

Help please,

I don't want to jump in too quickly and install the wrong chat room add on to my forum and it gets more and more confusing the longer I spend looking at different ones - can you guys please help me to make an informed choice - my criteria are as follows -

Least server intensive
Will be supported and work fine with future versions of vbulletin
Needs to be able to integrate with my site pages and display my chosen adverts

All suggestions and help greatfully received

Chatrooms kill forums

I wouldn't install one if I were you

I've tried the exo chatroom and the Toksta chatroom

The exo chat room exists purely for my mods and the Toksta was for members.

Toksta is gltichy, doesnt always connect which is sometimes lame. I recommed you only use chat for your mods since they use alot of server queries.

we use MGC Chatbox Evo

members love it, they can set their font colr once and the shoutbox remembers it

it supports multiple channels so members can discuss trades and arrange games in thoese respective channels.

i have it set to only load on forumhome and to time out after 5 minutes of inactivity so the server load is not too high. chatboxes/shoutboxes do cut down on forum activity but they can also be a positive feature that draws more members to your forum in the first place.

I've used Devion's chat box and Cyb's Cyberchat one.
To be honest, Devion's chat box had a better feeling / design but was causing some server overload. Then I switched to Cyb's one and it worked great, easy to use and no template edits.

I do agree that a chatbox can kill some forum activity as in posts and what not but it also does increase more users at one time cause they're all on and chatting together. If the people on my forums have a simple question to ask, they usually do it in the chat box and if they dont get a reply, they take make a thread - which is good cause we don't really like spam =p

FlashChat 5.0.11

http://forum.tufat.com/index.php

Yeah that was what I was going to suggest. the developer is pretty good about making updates for vb in FlashChat.

I think blab chat is one of the best
http://hot-things.net/shots_b4/b4shot-n.htm
http://hot-things.net/

Flashchat, but I'd stick with the latest 4.X.X version.

blab IM is the best PHP CHAT script out there....this coming from someone who knows about programming.... + it's free

you can also get the pro version if you want more options.

http://hot-things.net/blab-im-ajax-php-messenger