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.

[skol]

With respect,it's a chat mod.Translations 59 languages very impressive but what do you use to translate.To expensive at the moment and don't really see the benefits.Can't see web cam availabilty...At those prices you should at least have that feature available..

[jamiedolan]

I know this is kind of a Me Too comment, but here is some more feedback.

I think you have a nice looking product. I'd really be interested in it for my new VB forum; but, and do correct me if I am wrong, basically your system counts everyone that is logged into VB as a user?

My other forum, which is a tiny niche site has had up to 77 people on it at one time, so I would have needed to be on a $49 a month plan to avoid showing users errors.

I understand the technical requirements of this app and why it can be resource intensive. It would not fair well on most shared hosting accounts for all but just a few users.

That said, many many of use here that has any kind of sizable site are already on a VPS, dedicated, or cloud type of services with substantial resources at our disposal, often sitting idle.

If this was also sold as a self-hosted (and not just a SAAS) I'd be very interested in it. I feel it would be worth $200 a year for self-hosted up to maybe 300-500 people online.

The other option would be to only count the people that are actually chatting, now I understand why this don't really make sense from a technical stand point because you have to basically be "pinging" all the users all the time to keep the chat available and communicating with them, but it would make the current pricing structure much more reasonable.

Based upon the demos for this product, I would love to use it. However, thinking about the lunch of my new site in the next 30-60 days, I can easily see a launch day that brings in 205 visitors. I sure don't want those people seeing any kind of error message. I just can't possibly justify a $119 a month plan.

I do see where you have a potential market, with doing this SAAS chat, to the larger boards, but I feel far and away, it is going to only be the top few hundred largest boards that are going to be interested at these prices.

Do please let me know if you decide to sell the software for self-hosting or even if you change your pricing structure so it is more reasonable for smaller forums.

[andrew.lee]

@jamiedolan - Thanks for the feedback, and the compliments!

One thing you should probably keep in mind is that our customers almost universally substantially overestimate how many online users they have at any given time. I think this is largely due to forum software (including vBulletin) estimating the number of online users very poorly. It is usually off by a factor of 2 or 3 or more. Here's a forum, for example, that vBulletin claims peaked at 3417 users online, but I've never seen it over 400... http://www.w8baby.com/forums/forum.php

500 simultaneous users is a truly enormous site. The vast majority of our customers use and are happy with our Free or Basic plans. I'd encourage you to give one of our paid packages a (free) try and see what kind of usage you actually need. I suspect you'll find that you need a much cheaper plan than you realized. (We had a customer sign up the other day *convinced* he needed 3000 simultaneous. In reality he needed about 75...)

As far as self-hosting goes. It's not as simple as it sounds. I'm guessing your server runs apache -- if so, it wouldn't be able to handle 100 chatters much less 500. Apache just isn't built to handle that type of usage. This isn't to say you couldn't run a different server and learn how to set up real-time software up -- just that we've decided the support and usability costs of having a do-it-yourself version just aren't worth it.

[jamiedolan]

Originally Posted by andrew.lee

@jamiedolan - Thanks for the feedback, and the compliments!

One thing you should probably keep in mind is that our customers almost universally substantially overestimate how many online users they have at any given time. I think this is largely due to forum software (including vBulletin) estimating the number of online users very poorly. It is usually off by a factor of 2 or 3 or more. Here's a forum, for example, that vBulletin claims peaked at 3417 users online, but I've never seen it over 400... http://www.w8baby.com/forums/forum.php

I've seen that before where the VB counter does appear to be quite high.

Originally Posted by andrew.lee

500 simultaneous users is a truly enormous site. The vast majority of our customers use and are happy with our Free or Basic plans. I'd encourage you to give one of our paid packages a (free) try and see what kind of usage you actually need. I suspect you'll find that you need a much cheaper plan than you realized. (We had a customer sign up the other day *convinced* he needed 3000 simultaneous. In reality he needed about 75...)

That's a pretty big difference. So how does it count the connections? If people are just leaving the forum window open in the background, does that count as a user? The numbers I threw out where high. I wasn't thinking of simultaneous chatters at all. However, I can see a moderately popular forum, say a 1000 visitors a day, end up with a couple hundred people with browsers windows open, even if they were not actively browsing, If I understand correctly, these would each use up a connection?

Originally Posted by andrew.lee

As far as self-hosting goes. It's not as simple as it sounds. I'm guessing your server runs apache -- if so, it wouldn't be able to handle 100 chatters much less 500. Apache just isn't built to handle that type of usage. This isn't to say you couldn't run a different server and learn how to set up real-time software up -- just that we've decided the support and usability costs of having a do-it-yourself version just aren't worth it.

Yes, I can understand and respect that the support load would indeed be very high for the majority of users. I forget how many people can barely manage to edit a php file. What are you running on LightSpeed? Lighttpd?

I'll be installing VBSEO's Gravity Insights this afternoon, which should give a very accurate accounting of who is really online.

I'm interested to know though; is the pricing really simultaneous chatters or people who have a browser open on your site? There is a huge difference there, and I was assuming the large number of connections I mentioned based on the latter.

Thank You for your response;

Jamie Dolan

[andrew.lee]

So we count everyone who currently has a tab open on our page. In our experience, 1 simultaneous user on average equates to roughly 1000 unique visitors per month on the "average" website. This number is often higher for forums, and higher still for really tight-knit forums. On *our* website, you'll notice we tend to average about 15-20 people at a time, and our website has pretty typical stats. If you have 1000 visitors per day I think it unlikely you'll have hundreds at any given time -- unless you are holding scheduled events of some kind. Most people tend to sleep, have jobs, eat meals, browse other websites, etc : )

I don't know the details of how vBulletin estimates usage. I think they just guess based on how many requests have occurred recently. They tend to guess quite high in our experience.

We're actually running a pretty complicated setup with multiple different servers each serving up a different piece of our service. The real-time webserver portion is built on top of a server called Jetty which is specifically designed for this type of usage.

As I said, we have free trials on all our plans, so you can try it out and see how many simultaneous users you have. If it's too many you wont pay a cent.

[jamiedolan]

Originally Posted by andrew.lee

Most people tend to sleep, have jobs, eat meals, browse other websites, etc : )

Sleep, eat, gosh who's got time for that when you have forums!

Originally Posted by andrew.lee

As I said, we have free trials on all our plans, so you can try it out and see how many simultaneous users you have. If it's too many you wont pay a cent.

Sounds good, I'll give it a try and see how it goes.

Thanks again for the answers;

Jamie

[andrew.lee]

Great! Feel free to reach out to us over email if you have any troubles.

[MagiKelly]

I'm afraid your assumptions are way off. My forum has just under 9000 registered users with about 1500 at most visiting during any month. So not a big forum in the scale of things and with the basic package allowing 25 chatters I was seeing the chat full about half the time and during most of these no one was actually chatting at all.

[ahmedipa]

nice one I hope that will work well thank you very much

[onehost]

Andrew,

I have been trying to find out for some time why my site was loading so slowly. I was
blaming comcast for the longest time as I have outages with them sometimes...then
in my testing process, I removed your free chat mod that I am using, wow, what
a difference, my site is loading a lot quicker the very second I uninstalled your mod.

is there anything you can do about this. If not, then I can not give up
site speed over a chat mod that pretty much slows the site to a drag...