Chat software comparison. Your opinion please.

[Alfa1]

Could you post or PM a link to the page where you have sparkweb working?

[Mum]

Originally Posted by abrecher

Do you have it set up with VB integration sharing member logins ?

Sure do

Originally Posted by Alfa1

Could you post or PM a link to the page where you have sparkweb working?

You can join at my site (you have to be a member to go to chat) and click on Chat in the main menu to see it working

[Alfa1]

Where can I find installation instructions?

[djxcee]

The only chat software I used with vBulletin is addonchat.
Fast, stable and secure and there's a free version.

[cmmguy]

I use ShoutMix $2/month... very clean, fast and simple.

http://www.shoutmix.com/main/

[iogames]

Why PJIRC not?

[kako_paidi]

pjirc is java client for irc server
not every user has access directly to an irc server
(in many cases company/university firewalls block connections on all other ports exept 80/http and 443/https)
furthermore irc has limitations to user nicknames and some nicks may be already used by someone else.

ps.
sparkweb seems interesting
i'll try to setup it to my server

[Mum]

sparkweb is great - that's what i use

www.mibbit.com is a great for irc as all members can use it - even behind firewalls.

[Lea Verou]

RealChat is very good out of the box and its the most good looking one (according to my taste) but I wouldn't recommend it to any developer out there or any demanding admin. You get stuck with the original features and look (you can only customize the colors and the graphics - but you have to keep the graphics the same size). Its closed source, even if you offer extra payment, so you can't make changes to the software by yourself and the developer refuses to do paid modifications. It also seems quite abandoned. You can't even change the smilie shortcuts or add/remove smilies (you can change the graphics though, as long as your new smilies are not animated and at the same size or smaller) and the predefined smilie shortcuts suck.

123flashchat has more features and even though its closed source (it wasn't in the past, but it is now, sadly), you can pay for modifications. However, its customer support is terrible and its interface looks amateurish and its quite buggy. Its development isn't dead though, so we can hope for the future.

Digichat looks very nice and I got to know it better thanks to this thread. I haven't bought it, as I've already spent ~$1000 in the above products, so I'm not sure we can afford to try a third one, and I feel very sorry I didn't notice it more when I was searching. I had stumbled across their site, but I didn't appreciate the looks of the chat, so I didn't check the features as carefully as I should have. If I had done this, I would have seen that it can be very customized. I feel so stupid.

[Alfa1]

Can a moderator please add the following options to this poll:
Digichat
Realchat
Parachat
Flashcoms
Sparkweb