Chat Modifications - Dream's Chatbox

This adds a simple Chatbox in your forum home page for your members to chat.

The Chatbox is like a thread, members leave small messages in it for others to see. Think of it as an off-topic thread that never ends. The Chatbox can also help keep chatting out of the threads.

This mod is light on the server, uses little server resources to work. The default refresh rate is set to 5 minutes. You can disable automatic refreshing entirely in the options.

What's the refresh rate? The chatbox updates the messages shown every given seconds, that's the refresh rate. It sends a request to the server asking for new messages every X seconds, that you choose in the options.

Warning: If you set your refresh rate to 10 seconds this mod stops being so server friendly. You can do it, but be sure your server can handle it.


Features:
- Ajax (no page refreshes)
- Pages
- Set refresh rate in seconds
- Hide Chatbox contents from certain user groups
- Set user groups that can't send messages but can view chatbox
- Moderator user groups that can delete messages
- Disable auto refresh for guests
- Prune messages by user ID, user name, days old or all
- Enable/disable smilies, bbcode and [ img ]
- Automatic URL parsing
- Users can delete their own messages
- Smilies popup with all smilies you can use in messages
- Who's Online Support
- Show message dates or not
- User names linked and colored with their user group colors
- Banned Users
- Hide refresh button
- /me code
- Optional message colors
- Bunch of options in the Admin Control Panel

Live Demos: (leave your live demo in this thread!)
http://www.fliz.ru/ (russian)
http://www.sustainabilityforum.com/forum
http://www.virtualorbit.com/
http://www.bowlandcentral.com/forum


VERSION HISTORY



This mod is now final. It has all the features I think a chatbox should have, so I won't be adding more features to it. Anyone has my permission to use this as a base for another mod. It will still be updated for bugs though.

[Dream]

10,000 views! WOOHOO \o/

[Mark.B]

Just to say, this is really good and is much less resource-intensive than other shoutboxes.

For pruning, I created a scheduled task cron file to delete all shouts over 48 hours old, this runs every hour via the admin CP and keeps things manageable. I also disabled autorefresh to keep resources down.

The only thing I think would be useful would be a smilie popup window or dropdown, with clickable smilies.

[rnmcd]

Originally Posted by evotion

Great mod.. Thanks vm.

by the way, did anybody find a way to have the chat JUST show up in a forum of one's choice....

I'd like it to just show up only in forum ID 6, for example, and NOT the forum home.

Where do I got to make the required change.

I'd like to know the answer to this too.

[lard007]

thanks again - just put the updated version in

We use vbshout but as you can't have more than one shoutbox, and also because flashchat is to intensive for just admin chat I have once again put this great little chat client in place

One query that I have is whether you can restrict who can view chats - I have it so that only admins can see the CMPS module that I put this in but if you browse to the chat.php page anyone can view it - any ideas how to restrict this?

Thanks again!

Larry

[solinarius]

Hello, how can i change order of display- eg. last shout on the bottom, first on top?
and ofcourse, form on bottom?
thanks in advice.

[Dream]

You would need to get someone to change the code for you solinarius.

I'll be making a major update to this mod to address most if not all of you guys concerns, but it will take me some time.

[Fungsten]

This is interesting!

[solinarius]

awsome i can't wait

[Fungsten]

This is what's in the Chatbox.php:

$cantshout = array(1,3,8,12); //usergroup ids that are not allowed to send messages

Also, do all members who have access to the chatbox see everything that has been posted? In other words, this chatbox is not for a one-on-one member to chat with?

[solinarius]

No, is something like shoutbox, small thing to talk online about nothing