IRCBrowse - no Eggdrop + no FTP!!

I looked at the "IRCUsers" hack written by eyeball (aka supreemball) using the ftp mirc script coded by Rich@home.nl and I thought wow this is cool. Then I looked at what's involved.

*It modifies global.php, meaning that EVERY PAGE of your forum loads this information even though only index.php uses it.

*It adds 1,150 lines of code to your mIRC.

*Requires 24/7 FTP access


So I thought, why not have vBulletin AND mIRC interface with a PHP file?
Thank you eyeball and Rich for the inspiration to write this!

I don't have a photo/snapshot because the PHP script runs "silent" and how the output looks all depends on your vB template.

The PHP script provides the # of total chatters, the highest # of chatters ever, and a formatted (customizable in the PHP script) comma-delimited list of users in the chat which you can insert anywhere in your templates (an example template under forumhome is provided).

The mIRC script opens a socket to your web server (HTTP) and does an "HTTP GET" to request the ircbrowse.php script. The secret is, it puts all the data in the Query line after the URL and then just ignores the page it gets back from the web server and closes the socket. This is all password-protected.

This is my first hack posted here so please be gentle.

This hack is operating on:

SereneScreen Aquarium Forum
Anime System

[S1R1US]

btw will this display half-op status also? how bout voiced? i've seen one with hop before but not voiced

[feldon23]

S1R1US said:
looks very very nice. I have the similar hack at the bottom of my forums, pokecommunity.com but like yours better.

Looks good there. Lots of chatters, wow!

S1R1US said:
Will it work with 2.2.9.

I'm using it on 2.2.9.

S1R1US said:
Also how do it upload the list and keep it up to date without eggdrop or ftp mirc?

That is the magic.

I looked at mIRC's ability to open any socket and then looked up the HTTP 1.0 spec to see what the bare minimum communication necessary for mIRC to invisibly "open a website" long enough for the PHP script to grab the information being passed to it. Turns out it didn't take much. I tell you. Khaled needs to scrap mIRC's scripting and put PHP. NOT having a space in one spot kept me hamstrung for 45 minutes.

S1R1US said:
Also i've been looking for a java chat to use on my forums and ur script will go perfectly with using it since it links the channel name with the java applet. Can u tell me info to get the chat applet ur using as well.

I am using the freebie at webmaster.com. As a result, I am locked into their chat network. They just updated the Java and it is a bear now. Before, maybe it was feature-light, but it loaded fast and worked reliably. Now it's bloatware that loads 60% of the time. And all the new users who come into my chat butt into the fact that this chat network has like 20,000 registered nicknames.

Wonder what's involved in running my own IRCd.
EDIT: I am now using jPilot jIRC Java Chat. Best $50 I've spent.

[feldon23]

S1R1US said:
btw will this display half-op status also? how bout voiced? i've seen one with hop before but not voiced

The mIRC script passes ops, half-ops, voiced, and regular users to the PHP script. In the PHP script, you have complete control over how each of the 4 groups' names are styled and prefixed.

[feldon23]

VeloCD said:
It works perfectly now, great hack!

I had requested this in Eyeball's last hack, and that is is there a way to grab the topic from the channel in the chat, then I could display that variable?

Looking good!

The topic thing has some challenges to it. I'd have to emulate stripslashes in mIRC somehow, deal with spaces, etc. I'll look into this.

Is this something that should be in the full release, or a special version? What other things do people want added?

[Velocd]

Displaying the channel topic is about the only other addition for this hack I can think of that would be useful, if I can think of some other ideas I'll let you know

[feldon23]

Another point I must raise is that there are very real limits on the number of users this script can handle.

Because the list of users is being sent through a URL, you may slam into URL length problems if you have 60+ users in your chatroom.

I am paraphrasing here...
Although the RFC referring to URLs does not indicate a fixed length, Internet Explorer cannot handle more than 2083 characters in a URL and some proxy servers limit the # of characters to 255.

I am 99% sure that the PHP script will simply truncate a lengthy URL and provide an incomplete nick list, even if a nick boundary falls on a + character. I am not sure, however, what mIRC will do. It might fail to send any part of the URL.

I suppose some kind of buffering system could be created with "action=write" followed by a series of "action=append". Heaven help us if the appends arrive out of sequence.

Still, I'm pretty darn happy with how this hack is working.

VeloCD, you can imagine that adding the topic would be a huge stumbling block for URL length. A topic like this (from "A Fish Called Wanda"):
"It's k-k-k-Ken and he's c-c-c-coming to k-k-k-kill me!"

would expand to something like:
%26It's%20k-k-k-Ken%20and%20he%25s%20c-c-c-coming%20to%20k-k-k-kill%20me!%26

Again, I can forsee this being handled with "action=topic&topic=...", etc.

[feldon23]

Why do I get the feeling I'm going to be up all night writing 1.1. ?

The appends would have to be tagged so they can be reassembled in the right order at the other end. Ugh this is going to get messy.

Or I could take a crash course in MySQL and just append to the database, making sure that each of my append URLs finishes on a complete nickname.

[JulianD]

Thanks! I have to take a look at this hack!

[S1R1US]

thanks for all your replies feldon!

So the chat u use can only be used for their network? cause i wanna be able to use it for Aniverse and have forum users click the chan name and it connect with the java applet u have. I've seen them before but I like the way yours looks the best.

[S1R1US]

hey whats it mean when someone says run the file from AdminCP to install?

That was in the instructions of one of the hacks i'm trying to install and i have no clue how to do that.

Also what is Query's and how do i do them. Will need step by step on this one cause have not a single clue what it is, what it does, how to do it, or where to do it at^_^

Thanks