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.

[arco]

I did update the chatbox.php earlier.

Holy macaroni! I got it working!
Changed the following:

     if ($tagarounduser) {
        $tagopen = "<$tagarounduser>";
        $tagclose = "</$tagarounduser>";
    }

To:

    if ($tagarounduser) {
        $tagopen = "<span title=\"$time\"><$tagarounduser>";
        $tagclose = "</$tagarounduser></span>";
    }

And the following from:

    echo "\n".'<span id="shout'.$shout['shoutid'].'">['.$time.'] '.$tagopen.$username.$del."$tagclose: ".$parsed.'<br /></span>';

To:

    echo "\n".'<span id="shout'.$shout['shoutid'].'"> '.$tagopen.$username.$del."$tagclose: ".$parsed.'<br /></span>';

So now the time of the message is only shown when holding the mouse over the username. I'm happy!

[Dream]

Nice grats!

I didn't know you could do that with <span>.

I'll see to adding that in the next version so you won't need to edit it everytime.

[arco]

That would be nice Dream. And yeah, it's amazing what you can achieve by experimenting a little.

[Mark.B]

Originally Posted by Dream

Thanks Badger

That happens to everyone, when a user loads the forum homepage, it loads the chatbox after, making the user appear on the chatbox in Who's Online. I'll see if I can add something to fix that.

I'm not finding that actually....I've tested this with a test account, if someone loads forumhome they show as viewing the index. I think.

[Mark.B]

I have to say I've been using this for a while now and it knocks spots off any other shoutbox....it's quick, clean, efficient, and doesn't get you nasty emails from your host about use of server resources!

The only modification I made to it was to adapt some of the code into a cron job so that shouts are pruned automatically every 48 hours via a vB scheduled task.

[Dream]

Glad to hear it let me know if you have problems with the new ajax.

Did you like the smilies feature?

[Mark.B]

Originally Posted by Dream

Glad to hear it let me know if you have problems with the new ajax.

Will do...no problems so far in any browser, despite me playing with the layout slightly....nothing much, just added the date into each shout line and made the input box and shout button invisible to guests. I managed not to break it doing that, which has impressed me.

Did you like the smilies feature?

Yes...that's perfect, thanks!

[Mads]

nice work!

[eurofunny]

Great Work, thx from Germany.

Is there a way to post every hour a text with cron?? Is there a way then post please the script for this and post please to autoprune after 24 hour.

Thx for this Chatbox i clicked install

[Dream]

Hello, glad you liked it

This is possible, but you would have to code two php files to be called by vBcron every hour and another every 24 hours. I'm not sure how vBcron works, but maybe Mark. B could help you out, he made an auto prune file, send him a PM.

Mark, could you share your cron script? I could add it to the zip file with instructions on how to set it up.