Adding Chat To Forum

[kriscarter]

Hi everyone!

I have a question about adding a Chat to my forum. I will just briefly explain my forum. It's a Christmas forum from the North Pole. Santa, Mrs. Claus and the elves (sometimes the reindeer) will post and interact with the people on the forum.

We would like to add a chat to our forum. I'm thinking something like, a few times a week Santa will be in the chat room answering questions.

So I'm looking for an add on chat that I can put on my forum. I have done a Google search, and there are a lot you have to pay for by guest. I am going to assume this will get more popular as we get closer to Christmas, and I do not want to spend $300 every time we do a chat (ya know?)

Second, and I don't know how or if this can be done. Is I don't want people in there that are going to "ruin" it for everyone. Making fun of Christmas and Santa. I plan on ONLY having our members of the forum be in the chat, so I know if they get out of hand I can ban them from the forum all together, but is this something I can do in the chat too?

I have done some searching on here as far as chats go... and I'll just say it... I'm confused. I'm not really good at this vBulletin stuff. We had someone install the vBulletin and our template, the rest I have managed to do on my own. But reading some of this stuff I'm like.. do I have that? What is this? :-)

So in your opinion what do you think I would need to add on a chat to my forum?

Thank you in advance for your time,
Kris

[FreshFroot]

It all depends on how you want to do it. Anything is possible.

Is Santa supposed to be a programed bot? or a real person answering questions?

[kriscarter]

No Santa will be a real person chatting. Everything we do on the site is in real time, with real people, not bots.

Kris :-)

[Kamran]

I have 123FlashChat installed which you can acess when you click the chat link in the navbar on my forum.

They do offer to install it for you and link it to your vbulletin for an extra fee. I've had no problems so far.

I have it set so guests and members can access the rooms however you can set it just so its members only.

You only pay a one time fee unless you want them to host it for you.