[plug] OSS web based chat room server

[Timothy White]

On 8/17/05, Meryon Montgomery <monts at westnet.com.au> wrote:
> Hi,
>     I am looking for a chat room style server that I can embed into a
> web site. I need something that forms part of a web site because the
> server sits behind several layers of firewalls and only port 80 is
> allowed through. The machine is a Debian Sarge machine running a LAMP
> stack.
> 
> Some of the other requirements (wish list) are listed below:
> 
> 1. Its to allow students from several schools to communicate live in a
> private chat room, for a specific project.
> 
> 2. Only the students and their teachers can view and participate in the
> conversation.
> 
> 3. As the sys admin, I have sole control of the registration of students
> and teachers.
> 
> The students already have access to a phpbb based forum to post their
> opinions and answers, but a request has come in to provide this live
> chat feature. ( Thats what constantly delivering the impossible gets
> you, more impossible requests).
> 
> I hope that there is an already existing OSS solution to my needs.

Well. I now get a reason to resurrect my project. You can see a demo
which is fairly old at http://ihcc.sf.net/demo (which is running of
the plug server, hehe)
It is all PHP, no database needed.

Currently anyone can register, but it would be very easy to set it up
with passwords and closed registration. It's something I'm currently
working on. Currently the user 'database' is all in a text file. But
I'm fairly confident I could port it to mysql. I would actually build
it with support for both backends as I don't like locking people out
who don't have sql hosting.

It would be fairly easy to have a webbased admin interface for
administrating users and stuff. A really should upload my latest dev
version, it includes things like time outs, and idle notification and
stuff. Interesting, the biggest problem with the one currently up is
people forgetting to logout.

If I get a chance tonight I'll put the dev version up for you guys to play with.

And I'll say this, please try and break it! I once gave the AIC
training school juniors the chance to break it, and had to quickly
take it down from the server before they broke other peoples
computers. They started putting recursive loops and stuff in. That was
before I disallowed java and lots of html!

feel free to contact me with any ideas and changes, I'm more than
happy to work on it.

Tim