Users in Chat -with eggdrop, works no matter what-

First and foremost, I would like to thank Sparkz for a little bit of TCL help. I had been playing with the idea for some time now of using an eggdrop bot and vBulletin to put current chatters on my forum home. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the perfect TCL to use. The current TCL is a mix between my own script, a script I found online and Sparkz script.

** YOU MUST HAVE AN EGGDROP BOT **

After seeing this hack on vbulleting.org, I wanted it for my site. Unfortunately, it was not being released, so I decided to make my own! Here it is, hopefully you can figure most of it out yourself.

What it does is uses an eggdrop bot (not going to explain what it is). The bot refreshes the userlist when a user leaves or enters the channel, this keeps the list up to date always. When you load index.php, the list is downloaded from the shell and read into a variable. This variable can be put on your forumhome template
and viewed by the user. This hack also gets the current channel topic and the current server that the chat is on.

Pros:
* Works for any IRC method (jpilot, mirc, eirc, etc.)
* No page refreshing or database calls
* Is ALWAYS up-to-date

Cons:
* Uses FTP and eggdrop

Support for this hack is limited due to the fact that I am a busy person.

I hope you enjoy this hack, it's my first.

- joey

[Sparkz]

Not everyone has PHP compiled with the ftp-extension. Could cause some problems. Also, this WILL slow down page loading, since it needs to connect to a remote host to grab the users every time the page is loaded. And if you have a busy site, you will also bog down the bot with a lot of traffic.

Just a couple of pointers you might want to consider for a future version

[[D]Vincent]

And where can I get the eggdrop bot? But I guess if guy says it will slow down loading then I'm not installing it XD

[sas1911]

It was the easiest method I could think of.

If I had a dedicated server, I'd stick the eggdrop right on the same server and eliminate some of the problem. (which you can do anyway).

If the bot load gets too high, you can remove the bind and put in a timer. (if you know tcl - which I am not really good with).

So, to completely optimize this script, get a dedicated server, run your eggdrop off of that and use a timer instead of bind.

Until then, feel free to play/optimize this hack.

[jcroft]

Hey there!

I've been looking for something like this. Having a bit of trouble with it, though.

I've changed the config vars in userschatting.tcl, and uploaded it. It loads fine with my eggdrop, and the userlist.txt is created. However, no user data is ever appended to the list. Do i have to do something to start the process?

[sas1911]

The userlist file is updated when a user joins the channel.

[jcroft]

I understand that's how it's supposed to work. However, it's not working. I've had users going in and out of my channel for two hours now, and I'm left with an empty file.

Any suggestions?

[sas1911]

Try this tcl. If this doesn't work, you installed it wrong, because this is the exact tcl that I'm using on my eggdrop and everything is working for me. What version of eggdrop do you have?

[futureal]

To speed this up, I would suggest having the eggdrop update a database table at regular intervals, and then have vBulletin pull that information straight from the database. That should fix any sort of major page load issues.

(I have not looked at the code or anything, so maybe that is how it already does it? I dunno... but that's how I would do it).

[Martin64]

Great idea! I read about this hack here and thought it seemed interesting, so I downloaded the attached file and had a look at it. I decided to have a go at it, so I spoke to one of the other server admins who is operating our IRC bots, and asked him if he could add the script to a bot. He thought it was a great idea as well, so he re-wrote the TLC script and the code implented to index.php and I did some simple template modifications. I turned out great and I love it . I made it look similar to the "Currently Active Users" box and put it right below it.

Users with @ in front of their nicks are Operators, with + in front of their nicks are voiced users and the others are regular users. "Most Users Ever Online in #Channel" will be worked on next. The list is updated whenever someone joins, parts, quits, get kicked or get banned.

The users are sorted by status (Op -> Voiced -> Reg. Members) and alphabetically as well. I would have to check with my fellow server admin if he wants to release it as a hack, but I don't think that would be a problem (if there's interest, that is), and if so, I'll release it as a separate hack since the code is completely different (although Major thanks to sas1911 for presenting this idea). Check out the attached screenshot and view it online at www.emutalk.net