Chat Hack

First of all, let me thank all who have worked on the various hacks already. The work you all do is tremendous. Here is my suggestion for a hack that I think would be quite useful.

It's a real time chat hack. Now I know there are plenty of scripts out there that let you set up chat rooms, but I'm talking about one integrated into vBulletin. I envision a chat system where the room is always open to registered users. The column of users would be listed somewhere on the page, and double clicking a user would bring up their profile. I have no idea how difficult this would be to create, or what kind of strain would be put on the server, but if it could be done I think it would be a tremendous addition.

What do you guys think,
Cameron

Tom,
Can we see this in action somewhere?

Yes, you can. My forum is located at

http://www.downsyn.com/forum/index.php

Please keep in mind that this is a forum for parents who recently have had a child with Down syndrome so please treat the board and the chat room with respect. You will need to register to use the chat room and to see how the board looks. Please enter into the biography section a note that this registration is for testing purposes so I can delete it later on. Thanks.

I like the idea of being able to page a user. You click on their name and send them a message--is this what people mean by private messaging?

There seems to be so many ways to communicate. I'm wondering which are best.

No... private messaging is sort of like a mailbox system. Paging is available through products like ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger.

Very nicely done my friend. I have some issues with PHP MY Chat but your integration is very nice. Thanks!

Originally posted by Tom
Yes, you can. My forum is located at

http://www.downsyn.com/forum/index.php

Please keep in mind that this is a forum for parents who recently have had a child with Down syndrome so please treat the board and the chat room with respect. You will need to register to use the chat room and to see how the board looks. Please enter into the biography section a note that this registration is for testing purposes so I can delete it later on. Thanks.

I jusst wanted to explain what I meant by that this hack isn't great security-wise. I don't mean this opens up a security hole into your server! What I meant was that you would not have to be particularly clever to figure out how to impersonate someone in the chat room. I need to update phpMyChat so that it uses the same login security as vBulletin. Once that is done then it will be as difficult to impersonate someone in the chat room as it would be to impersonate that same person on the board.

I like all the extras.

I think the Chat is a little slow for a chat program though. And I wonder how slow it would become with several users posting at the same time.

The one benefit is that the chat is always there. But then again, one of the benefits of a Normal Chat program is that when someone leaves the room you can talk behind their back. And when they return they don't know anything about it. (I don't do that, but I'm sure others do it about me. I can tell. They're all snickering with their fingers, I can tell. Hey, you talking about me to?)

I'm not crazy about phpMyChat either but the fact that it is written in PHP is what makes it easy to integrate into vBulletin. If I had the source code for a good Java Chat program, I could hack it to use the vBulletin database...

I have hacked phpMyChat into vB also. I have done it a little bit differently as I use the vB cookie to set the username. This makes it much harder to impersonate someone else. You can view it at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions (you must register to use the chat). If anyone is interested I will post the code.

That's exactly what I was going to do when I had a chance. I would love to see the code since I hate having to re-invent the wheel. Thanks.

[Edited by Tom on 07-12-2000 at 07:31 PM]