Embedded chat

This "hack" will allow you to run a semi-integrated (free or paid) chat room "inside" your forum:

+ It's quite generic and should work with several chat providers (made a seperate template, just for the applet code)
+ The chat room will be displayed within your forum's structure,
+ The chat applet will be sized according to the user's screen resolution (could get scary at 1600x1200 )
+ People will be logged into the chat room using their forum usernames (if the chat supports auto-login)
+ Invalid characters in usernames will be replaced before logging in to the chat, plus too lengty names will be shortened
+ Easy installation

- At this time there's no feedback from the chat room to the forum. A "chat monitor" is planned though (version 2)

The install docs and template examples are mainly focussed on the chat provider we use (http://www.raidersoft.com), but it shouldn't be a problem adjusting one or two things to get this thing to work with your own chat provider.

The sizes of the chat applet haven't been tested out fully. I have no clue how bigger resolutions work out. All the rest seems to work fine.

Hope you like it...

[update 1.4]Sizes can now be set more easily, just by editing the chatredirect template, nothing else.
Added support for raidersoft's ICE, which is more flexible with usernames.

[trilOByte]

Great hack, I added it to my BB and am very happy, thanks. I had to redefine the fixed width tables, as I use portal and it forced the page to scroll because of the leftcolum. But figured it out easily enough. Well done.

Clicking on install for this hack.

One question, does anyone know how to show a list of "who's viewing that page" I need the code to stick in forumhome? I don't mind the 15min cookie timeout, anything is better than nothing, so very basic code will be fine until something better gets released..

[indiamike]

Originally posted by Ghostsuit
You might have missed him saying this
"One idea:
wait on the version that actually has a Who's in chat
It's ready enough now, so very soon..."

or maybe I've missed a different post.

Anyway fingers crossed he will release it.

I sort of have an idea about this "who's online" bit. Logically couldn't you just take your online.php and delete most of it out except for the "case 'chat':" parts (if you added them), change the permissions so everyone could see, rename the online.php to something else and make an include statement somewhere on your page showing who is on the page you have for your chat program.

Does that make sense?

Mike

[Prince]

Originally posted by indiamike


I sort of have an idea about this "who's online" bit. Logically couldn't you just take your online.php and delete most of it out except for the "case 'chat':" parts (if you added them), change the permissions so everyone could see, rename the online.php to something else and make an include statement somewhere on your page showing who is on the page you have for your chat program.

Does that make sense?

Mike

I see what you're saying but I do not think it would be very accurate. I have opened a new window on my forum while I am in chat and it then displays that I am in "who's online" even though I am also in the chat, and it does this with others as well.

[rharbison]

I notice that the chatroom here has a "Who's in chat" listing. Are they using a different hack or something? I really need that feature, and would be willing to switch to a different chat to get it.

[-=dm=-]

Hi WotMike
Im getting this error. (I have Gzip set to of)

Ho do I fix this?

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2002 11:31:53 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) mod_bwlimited/1.0 PHP/4.1.2 mod_log_bytes/0.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.7 OpenSSL/0.9.6b X-Powered-By: PHP/4.1.2 Content-Length: 6091 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html

it worked fine for me in the start.

thanx in advance

dm

[EDIT] if I copy the url to chat.php and past it in my browser, it works perfect, just not from the button[/EDIT]

[wot-Mike]

Hi dm,

Umm, I really don't have a clue. Something like this happened to me ages ago, not just with chat.php but also with vB's showthread.php. And the cause was having gzip turned on in both php.ini and vB. It never showed up until after I upgraded Apache.
This doesn't apply here, since you say gzip is turned off in vB.

Ok, if it worked before, then what has changed since then?

[-=dm=-]

Hi wot-Mike
only what I did was changes the size 400x315 to 400x600 and changed it back again.
I did nothing else
maybe I should reinstall the hack.

[wot-Mike]

Hmm, the silly thing is that there's not much to (re-)install. But I vaguely remember me having probs with something that dissappeared when I replaced a template with the original one.

Let me know how things go.

[Ghostsuit]

Wot Mike any news on the who's in chat showing up on anther page?

[wot-Mike]

The original one I worked on a while ago, umm, didn't work. I've looked at other things since then, and then wrote one of my own from the ground up. But it's rather similar to GeorgeofCS' DigiChat Hack. Mainly because I used the same database changes, hehe.
I've been running that version for a while now and it works fairly well. Some extra funcionality was planned from the start, like a login counter to control the number (and the way) of logins people have. That's why I used GeorgeofCS's db structure. I saw good use for the "inchat" field then.

But based on the experience from the last weeks there are some other things I like to incorporate as well. One of the things I want is to get rid of the autosizing javascript. It's a good thing, but there are nicer ways

If you're really handy I can give you the 2.0 version I have currently. But there's hardly an instruction manual for installing 2.0, so you'll have to know your way around to get it working, including changing your templates to get the Who's in Chat to display. Well, unless you like the Who's in Chat we have, embedded in the Welcome Panel.
And the coming version won't be compatible with this one, so you shouldn't be afraid of messing with your database too