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Adding Live Chat Functionality to a site

JohnK · 2006-09-27 10:02:53

Hi all. Does anyone have an idea of the best way to go about adding a chat room to a website? I’m looking for something that would allow visitors to the site communicate with each other but that’s not based off of an IRC channel or something like that so that the only way to be in the chat is if you’re on the website. At…

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27-09-2006 11:02am

#1

JohnK

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Hi all. Does anyone have an idea of the best way to go about adding a chat room to a website? I’m looking for something that would allow visitors to the site communicate with each other but that’s not based off of an IRC channel or something like that so that the only way to be in the chat is if you’re on the website. At this point I’m not sure if they want an open chat where everyone can participate or if they want more of a support desk offering so something that can handle both would be great.

I had a look on Google but all I can find are applets that act as IRC gateways or that host a chat on a chat server but we want it on our server.

Thanks,

John.

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#2 27-09-2006 11:40am
vito

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Meebo has a plugin. Check for that.

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#3 27-09-2006 11:51am
JohnK

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Thats vito but that seems to just connect some IM networks together. What I'd need is a closed chat which doesnt require the users to have accounts anywhere other than our site.

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#4 27-09-2006 12:26pm
projectmayhem

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you could use a tagboard, or even just register an IRC chatroom and use a java applet on your site

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#5 27-09-2006 12:33pm
JohnK

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Thanks projectmayhem but from what little I know of tagboards they only allow short messages and not really a chat and we're trying to stay away from IRC. We really dont want to be dependant on anyother servers to get this working so something thats completely self contained that we can install on our server would be best.

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#6 27-09-2006 9:41pm
Adam

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Why not just provide a www.gabbly.com link on your site, so the url would be www.gabbly.com/www.YOUR-URL-HERE.com.

Check it out, it could be perfect for you.

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#7 27-09-2006 10:34pm
JohnK

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I'll mention it to them but I think they really just want something self contained that would run off of our server. I'm surprised that there is not more out there to be honest.

thanks,

John.

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#8 27-09-2006 10:36pm
Adam

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No problem!

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#9 27-09-2006 10:37pm
Rollo Tamasi

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there are loads of options out there, your question just hasn't being answered on this thread properly.

http://www.123flashchat.com/

there is another website that offers a pretty cool chat room, flash based, but i can't remember the name of it..

do a search on sourceforge as well
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=chat+room

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#10 27-09-2006 10:41pm
JohnK

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Thanks Rollo Tamasi that looks the be the sort of thing I'm after

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#11 28-09-2006 5:43pm
Eoin

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You could also implement an AJAX solution that would emulate a chat room - isn't that what google use in their gmail client?

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#12 28-09-2006 6:14pm
JohnK

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Yeah it'd be a nice project to play with but I think that my hourly rate times the hours required to develop, test and deploy a chat room would probably be a tad bit more than the cost of buying some boxed software

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#13 28-09-2006 8:59pm
misterq

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I've used this fella previously: http://www.tufat.com/s_flash_chat_chatroom.htm

Worked well. I think it would address your requirements.

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#14 28-09-2006 9:35pm
JohnK

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Looks interesting misterq, thanks

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#15 03-10-2006 4:04pm
dangerman

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What about Gabbly? http://www.gabbly.com/

Here it is superimposed on this thread:

http://gabbly.com/www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054995929

Good luck!

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#16 03-10-2006 8:39pm
Adam

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dangerman wrote:

What about Gabbly? http://www.gabbly.com/

Here it is superimposed on this thread:

http://gabbly.com/www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2054995929

Good luck!

Read the thread?

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#17 03-10-2006 10:40pm
dangerman

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oops.

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#18 13-10-2006 3:31pm
Dr Galen

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what did u use in the end. i'm lookin at someyning similar for my site

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#19 13-10-2006 3:48pm
JohnK

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The 2 I recommended were
SiteChatter (http://www.sitechatter.com/) if they wanted a tech/sales support or 1 on 1 type chat with visitors
and 123 FlashChat (http://www.123flashchat.com) if they wanted an actual chatroom on the site.

To be honest I dont know if they plan to go ahead with it or not. Neither are exactly what we were looking for but they seemed to be some of the best out there.

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