Chat Modifications - Envolve Chat Integration Module

About the Envolve Chat Plugin
This module will connect your vBulletin forum to Envolve chat. Envolve is a chat toolbar similar to Facebook's chat bar that allows your users to have group and one-on-one chats with each other while browsing your forums.

This mod requires an API key from Envolve in order to function. Visit http://www.envolve.com to get one. A free version is available that provides a full feature set for up to 25 concurrent users. Higher numbers of chatters require a paid account.

This mod integrates your forum's account system with Envolve so that when users are logged into your vBulletin site it also logs them into the chat. In addition, it integrates your profile pictures / avatars and profile information. With the 2.0 release of the mod, other users can now view your profile information and get a link to your profile simply by placing their mouse over your name.

The Envolve chat system is a rich solution for community chat. Some of its features include group chat (both public and private), one-on-one chat, the ability to pop chats out into their own windows, moderation controls (boot / block / ban / timed ban), chat message translation, resizable chat windows, chat sharing, and drag-and-drop chat invitations. As a hosted solution, all chat traffic is handled by Envolve's servers and will not place any additional load on your server.

Installation:
Detailed installation instructions can be found here:
https://www.envolve.com/docs/vbulletin-chat-plugin.html. They are also provided in the Readme.txt file.
You can see and try out the chat at http://www.envolve.com.

This version of the mod will work for both vBulletin 4.x and vBulletin 3.8.x.

Screenshots:
Here the "People List" can be seen open in the lower right hand corner of the page. This shows all users who are currently viewing the forum. This site owner has chosen to only allow logged-in users to chat.


Here a public group chat has been opened, and the user has moused-over another user to see his profile information.


Here a user is creating a new group chat that will be shown to the other users on the site. He has also "popped-out" the "General" chat into its own window.

[andrew.lee]

You can customize your site by logging into our backend at http://www.envolve.com

Here is a video that explains how to change colors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ4AC...el_video_title

[Lee G]

I found this was setting off the check 4 hacking mod
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...69#post2225369

A few sweaty moments on that one

[andrew.lee]

Hi Lee - I'm not familiar with the check 4 hacking mod, so I don't know why it would be saying that. Our service runs everything through *our* servers, so it won't open up your servers to any new hacking threats. Might want to check with the authors of that mod to see what went wrong there.

[Lee G]

It was the early hours here when I was trying and testing, and I did not intend to come across as being rude by saying there were problems and then going quiet

Check 4 hacking, basically checks for code injections and other problems
I run further tests last night to see what it was reporting when this is installed
The error I got when doing a manual run of the check 4 hacking tests was Corrupt Datastore found!, pluginlist

The idea and concept of this system is brilliant
In the half hour I had it running, there were four people that had noticed it on the forum and decided to stay around and use it
The translation system thats built into it, again is another brilliant idea

[BirdOPrey5]

This is the mod Lee is talking about: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=265866

Although he is a little mistaken about what it does... it only scans all plugins for the string "base64" and if found reports the plugin as compromised because there has never been legit reason for base64 encoding to be used in plugins and 99.9% of the time it means a plugin was hacked.

I suggest eliminating the base64 encoding if possible or going back to having the code in a php file instead of a plugin.

[andrew.lee]

Ahh. Interesting. Yes, we do use base64 encoding. We do this to avoid corruption when we are sending your usernames / profile pictures to the chat servers. We have to sign this data and send it over the web so it's much safer to do this if no wierd characters are being used. This is actually for added security : )

[Equarter]

I have an Arabic forum, when I installed it, the Arabic user names was not showing correctly, the Arabic letters were seen as question mark, any help?

[andrew.lee]

@Equarter - We've heard similar reports of this. We'll look into the issue. Sorry about this! It'll probably require an update to the plugin to fix.

[Equarter]

thanks waiting for the issue to be resolved, loved the mod, but I can't use it now,

[sailnet]

this may have been answered already - Like this and would signup for the pro plan but I'd like to try it out first just for my moderators. if there a way to expose the chat toolbar just for a certain group...i.e. my moderators?

thanks