Chat Modifications - Ideal Chat Lite (facebook style bottom chat/chatroom bar) v1.3.0

This modification adds a bottom bar chat system to your board.

Features

• Friend?s Online List (mutal or all friends)
• Integration with vBulletin's ignore system so users can block messages from people they want
• General Chat Room
• User-to-User Chat
  • Chat with friends
• Support for infinite number of open chats
• Automatic Updating of chat messages
• New message indicators
  • Indicator on Chat Tab for new messages
  • A sound plays for new messages
  • Page title flashes for new messages
  • Indicator for new messages on tabs out of view
• Multiple window support
  • Supports users having your site open in multiple windows/tabs
  • Changes in one window automatically apply to other windows
• Automatically disables chat bar for mobile browsers
  • Help save bandwidth for your mobile users

Settings

• Admin Settings
  • Chat online
  • Ban individual users from chat
  • Update stream time limit
  • Update stream delay
  • Settings & Chat Room link Positions
    • Change where the links show at, or hide them all-together
• Usergroup Settings
  • Can use chat
  • Can use chat room
• User Settings
  • Hide Chat bar
  • New message notification method

Change Log
For a full list of changes, please visit: http://community.idealwebtech.com/in...ngelog&file=15

Installation/Upgrade
See included readme file.

Demo
You can see a demo here (You can can register a new account, or use the Login, "Ideal Chat Demo", and password, "chatdemo") This demo is of the pro version which can be found here!

Support
This modification is released for free, and as such we don't officially support it; however, as time permits we will try to offer support on it. We will NOT be monitoring this thread on a daily basis, your best bet for a fast reply would be to go post here.

Common Issues/Topics
Chat Bar Don't Show Up?
Have you configured the usergroup settings? This is the most common issue we see, and 99% of the time it is due to usergroup settings not being configured properly. So if your bar is not showing up, please verify your usergroup settings before reporting it as an issue.

Messages Don't Show Up?
We are aware of an issue causing messages to not show up for some people, and are looking into fixes.

Modification Has Conflict With Another Product
There is always a chance that two products will conflict with each other! We are aware of some, but please feel free to tell us about any products you find to conflict via our Bug Tracker on our site.

Chat Doesn't Support Certain Characters
The chat can only support the characters your board itself can support! If you would like to support certain characters, you must have your board using a charset that supports them. We have only ever once noticed a chat that didn't support every character the board did, and we are looking in it.

Chat Kills My Server
We have tested the chat extensively for server friendliness, and have found it to be very gentle on servers. We have seen the script run with hundreds of active users without putting hardly any load on the server. However, an improperly configured server may result in any reverse-AJAX/push-AJAX/Comet based chat script killing the server. If you find that your server slows down after installation, you may want to talk with your host about raising your MySQL and Apache Max Connection Limits to a more appropriate amount!

[charlow]

Just wanted to add - we're getting the same issue with the chat not displaying until the chat window is closed and reopened. Looking forward to your fix though. If you'd like me to install it prior to release to check if it sorts the issue, I'll be watching PMs for the next 3-4 hours.

[charlow]

...just had a severe slowdown as well which went away when we disabled the chat. Looking into it now.

[leave it to bea]

I'm with charlow on this. If you need another set of eyes to help out with a little testing let me know, I'd be more than happy to play with it. I'm a software QA engineer.

[ilanyon]

Hi,
Great mod and working fine on FireFox... But on both IE6 and IE8 for the same site, I'm getting a Page Error occurring and it is not working...

Although I think IE is pretty crappy, unfortunately a lot of my users use it...

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Error below...

[wullieclsfb]

used too muh of my hosting resources due to being on shared hosting if it if ever made more compatable for shared hosting i will try again

[Trip3151]

some reason the mod will not show on the forum
http://forum.builtforsin.org/forum.php
I set user group permissions.

[basilrath]

Ok running it now on the board ............. www.tabletennistalk.co.uk

[Bluefin221]

The chat has a huge problem with Internet Explorer 8 and below, users cannot post on the forums until the chat is disabled so something is causing a conflict, I did report this in your tracker but received no response from you regarding it. You seem to answer on here quicker.

[DNN]

Originally Posted by Ideal Web Tech

We have been running it on one of our live sites during almost the entire development phase, and we couldn't notice our site slowing any. We also monitored our server load regularly, and found it to not really even touch the server.

For a short time during the development, there was a bug that kept the connections from closing correctly, and at one point we had over a 100 copies running, and we didn't even notice for a while because our server load was so low, and our site was still loading normally. (Don't worry though, we fixed that bug!)

As for a paid version, you can find the pro version on our website in our store.



What about Brian?

this is an awesome mod. it does replicate facebook chat. just downloaded it and going to give it a shot

[Ideal Web Tech]

Originally Posted by Bluefin221

The chat has a huge problem with Internet Explorer 8 and below, users cannot post on the forums until the chat is disabled so something is causing a conflict, I did report this in your tracker but received no response from you regarding it. You seem to answer on here quicker.

No we only check in here periodically. We are on our sites almost 24/7 when we are up, checking in on things regularly. Just because we haven't replied in the bug tracker doesn't mean its not on our list to get fixed. We have an extreme amount of work between our staff to keep pumping things out smoothly and in a timely manor.

Please be patient as we work all the random bugs out, as frankly with all the different addons that aren't coded right, and vBulletin having some hook issues where it skips some global hooks and other stuff for the cms. As this script itself is in no way shape or form a simple script, as it takes extremely advanced and creative logic to keep it from just wrecking servers like many other chat scripts do.

Originally Posted by wullieclsfb

used too muh of my hosting resources due to being on shared hosting if it if ever made more compatable for shared hosting i will try again

Honestly scripts of this nature are not designed for shared hosting, as shared hosting limits resources considerable since most shared hosting servers tend to be jammed with sites which makes it easy to eat up the small amount of resources they want to allow you to use.