Chat Modifications - Dream's Chatbox

This adds a simple Chatbox in your forum home page for your members to chat.

The Chatbox is like a thread, members leave small messages in it for others to see. Think of it as an off-topic thread that never ends. The Chatbox can also help keep chatting out of the threads.

This mod is light on the server, uses little server resources to work. The default refresh rate is set to 5 minutes. You can disable automatic refreshing entirely in the options.

What's the refresh rate? The chatbox updates the messages shown every given seconds, that's the refresh rate. It sends a request to the server asking for new messages every X seconds, that you choose in the options.

Warning: If you set your refresh rate to 10 seconds this mod stops being so server friendly. You can do it, but be sure your server can handle it.


Features:
- Ajax (no page refreshes)
- Pages
- Set refresh rate in seconds
- Hide Chatbox contents from certain user groups
- Set user groups that can't send messages but can view chatbox
- Moderator user groups that can delete messages
- Disable auto refresh for guests
- Prune messages by user ID, user name, days old or all
- Enable/disable smilies, bbcode and [ img ]
- Automatic URL parsing
- Users can delete their own messages
- Smilies popup with all smilies you can use in messages
- Who's Online Support
- Show message dates or not
- User names linked and colored with their user group colors
- Banned Users
- Hide refresh button
- /me code
- Optional message colors
- Bunch of options in the Admin Control Panel

Live Demos: (leave your live demo in this thread!)
http://www.fliz.ru/ (russian)
http://www.sustainabilityforum.com/forum
http://www.virtualorbit.com/
http://www.bowlandcentral.com/forum


VERSION HISTORY



This mod is now final. It has all the features I think a chatbox should have, so I won't be adding more features to it. Anyone has my permission to use this as a base for another mod. It will still be updated for bugs though.

[kewl1uk]

Originally Posted by Dream

kewl, did you use the latest chatbox.php I updated?

I think so. I downloaded the zip from the Download Now section at around 7:00PM U.K. time - around 90 minutes ago from the time of this post.

[Dream]

Originally Posted by bandarsq

Thank you for the nice Mod.
I typed in Arabic Lang. and nothing came in the chat box, any help on this issue?

This mod doesn't support right to left text, sorry.

Kewl, it's working fine for me here in IE7, do you know what javascript error you get?

[kewl1uk]

Originally Posted by Dream

This mod doesn't support right to left text, sorry.

Kewl, it's working fine for me here in IE7, do you know what javascript error you get?

No idea, sorry. I'll have another go later when my board is less busy and this time I'll uninstall 1.3 and make a fresh install of 1.4 and see if that helps.

The error is with Ajax not working so the whole page needs to be refreshed.

Also another error seen by a member in Firefox is that when the auto refresh is set to a low number - 3 seconds - the refresh button flashes.

[Dream]

You don't need to reinstall, just change chatbox.php from 1.3 to 1.4 or the other way.

I sent you a PM.

[arco]

Hi Dream,

I'm trying to get the time showing when hovering the mouse over a username. I tried changing the function chatbox_make_user_link($user) to this:

function chatbox_make_user_link($user) {
    $name = fetch_musername($user);
    return "<a href=\"member.php?u=$user[userid]\" title=\"$time\" target=\"blank\">$name</a>";
}

Added a simple title inbetween there, but it doesn't show anything.

[Dream]

Arco, I don't know what HTML code to use to show mouse over text over text. It could be title, could be alt, and could need to be in <span> tags.

You need to update your chatbox.php too because of the IE7 bug, it actually affects you too.

[Dream]

I wish people that rate my mods with 1 star would state a reason :/

[BadgerDog]

Well, I rated it 5 stars.... clean simple install, efficient code, low system resource use and it gets the job done... good work and thanks again ... :up:

I did notice one thing... still wondering if it's just something on my system, or if others are seeing this....

Originally Posted by BadgerDog

I think I've found an anomaly, but I can't quite track down the sequence.

It's minor and I only noticed it after the code started showing in the "Who's on-Line" function, the fact that a user is in "Chat". I have noticed that on my system using v1.3 (also did it in v1.2), that it shows a "clickable" link to the Chatbox in the display, but under ""Who's on-Line", I'm always seeing myself and some others as being "in chat", when in fact, they never visited "Chat" at all during the current session?

Anyone else seeing this?

Thanks

Regards,
Badger

[Dream]

Thanks Badger

That happens to everyone, when a user loads the forum homepage, it loads the chatbox after, making the user appear on the chatbox in Who's Online. I'll see if I can add something to fix that.

[BadgerDog]

Originally Posted by Dream

Thanks Badger

That happens to everyone, when a user loads the forum homepage, it loads the chatbox after, making the user appear on the chatbox in Who's Online. I'll see if I can add something to fix that.

Ahhhh... roger that ... :up:

That makes sense....

Thanks...

Regards,
Badger