Whose in Chat beta

Ok I'm working on this piece for an upgraded digichat hack that will be out shortly.

The code is kind of rough and it currently only works completely right in the forum display areas. I've got it to run in the forum home, but not under active users for some reason.

Basically all this does is "check you in" at the chat door. And after the timeout for cookie time has passed you do drop off, even though you might be still in chat. But every other way I tried I ended up having people that were no longer in chat, but were still surfing the boards like 4 hours later and it was saying they were in chat.

Hope someone can use it

[GeorgeofCS]

umm would be nice if I added the hack huh?

[bokhalifa]

It will be my pleasure to cooperate with you, i have tested your code its very nice. i think if we combine your script with my hack we will have a nice chat with great features. i advise you to get this document cause it have all the parameters used in the chat applet.

http://www.digichat.com/documentation/DigiChat3.5.pdf

[GeorgeofCS]

Yup I got that before and unfortunately mine is a hosted chat room so I don't have access to alot of the programming features.

I've added a few more things to it. Mainly a way for my mods to get into the chat room without being seen.

I'm also adding a minimum posts to use the chat feature, etc. The only thing that has so far stumped me is getting it to work on the main page under active users. I can get it to work in other areas of the main page. Unfortunately my coding skills aren't the greatest. Once I get that taken care of I think I can patch the whole script up

[VirtueTech]

This is a great idea. I had dropped DigiChat and started to go with JPilot because of one main thing...I could not tell my users who was in the chat room in real time. It caused people not to use it.

Now I see some problems with your hack:
It only checks to see if a user visited the "Chat Load Applet Page" in the last 15 minutes then removes them.

So if the user stays in the chat room past 15 minutes of his login...they are removed from the "Currently in the chat room list"....this is not acceptable in my book.

Don't get me wrong I'm not being ungrateful...I think you have a great start here.

Here is soem ideas to solve this. What if we opened a pop-up window that had frames...and Frame A housed the chat applet, while frame B housed the script to check to see if the user is still in the chat FRAMES???

Would that work?

[GeorgeofCS]

Well portions of the code could be moved into a secondary script that would load in say a pop up, etc and then have the script refresh every 30 seconds say, but the only problem I see is possibly the resources it would use. I don't know how bad a small script could use up resources, which my site for example doesn't have much to spare

[VirtueTech]

I don't think it would be too bad ... I use Zend Cache or someone could use APC Cache so that it didn't execute the script constantly from scratch.

do you think you could contact me on AIM: VirtueTek 2

I would love to help you finish this by getting it to work on the front page and the popup screen like we talked about.

[rawnet]

Hello,

Will this integrate with vbPortal?

I run Digichat on my own server, and am looking for something which will not only integrate with the vBulletin/vbPortal database, but also indicate to other users who is currently in the chatroom.

Cheers,

Ross

[GeorgeofCS]

Well I don't run vbportal so I wouldn't know. I can tell you that I'm working out every kink possible with this hack. However after the incident with the older version of the digichat hack I'm kinda weary of actually releasing the newer version.

[rawnet]

Hi George,

Understand your concerns. I didn't download the modified version of your hack when I saw that the chap didn't have your permission, and I saw that shortly afterwards a moderator had closed that thread anyway.

It seems to have been accidental rather than anything intentionally malicious on the part of the chap who chopped up your code.

I hope that won't happen again, and that it won't put you off releasing this new Digichat hack you've worked on - would be extremely beneficial. I know my users are crying out for a system whereby they can get an idea who is in the chatroom without having to visit it, and I'm sure many other people would agree.

We need you GeorgeofCS. You're our only hope...

<cue credits...>

Cheers,

Ross