I know how hard it is to intergrate chatrooms with vB user ids, but this is something I want badly on my site. I tried irc and got it to work but irc does not allow numbers in user ids so that was a major problem - also you had to append each username with something in order to make the name unique.

I currently have a very good and reliable chat service from a company called Chat-forum (http://www.chat-forum.com or http://www.chat-forum.co.uk). I have been using it for 8 months now and I am very impressed. I have contacted the company regarding pulling in vB user ids and they are will to sort it for me. This would make the java login have fixed info pulled from the db which a user can not change - all they do is press enter. The code will have to be place on a vB page, but that is not pro, you can just create a new hidden forum and modify the template for it.

Getting to the point - they want ?150 to do this (about $250). To use the system you will also need thier gold chat package (?50). I can not affort ?150 at the moment, I some of you would like to go into this together it would make it better for me.

Have a look at thier test chatrooms on thier sites, they really are very good. Admin options are good and you can appoint many staff members. It is a very tidy system which is user friendly (unlike irc).

If you are interested in this unique hack, please let me know here and we can try to sort something out.

Not impressed Im affraid. I'm an avid lover of IRC, and I have used many different servers and networks over the past 5/6 years... for free. This stands out like a sore thumb in my mind as a bad IRC client, and an unprofessional service. £150 is outragious, and all you are getting is a slightly more advanced of the jPilot java chart module which can be linked to any (or multiple) IRC networks and also integrated into vB as show in the templates forum.

Just my honest opinion, but you could do so much better for a lot less money.

But irc does not allow user ids with numbers - so if a member has a number in their user id it will get rejected.

Not sure .. maybe on a really cheap chat server

You can use numbers and letters in nick names and also ^ if your lucky ..

I don't know .. I was only a chat host for talk city .. for about 4 years ;-)