[Dean C]

Originally Posted by MisterPopularity

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.