[plug] OSS web based chat room server

[Matthew Lambie]

On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 18:55 +0800, Timothy White wrote:
> 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.

I've seen a "more" realtime version using AJAX recently Google for AJAX
and graffiti wall should bring up what I'm talking about.

It was pretty snazzy. It wrote a file to /tmp and had a similar result
to what Tim's done but didn't have the refreshing problem.
-- 

Thanks,

Matthew Lambie
Technical Director

THE FRONTIER GROUP, PTY. LTD.
Suite 17/44 Kings Park Road
West Perth, WA  6005
Australia

w: http://thefrontiergroup.com.au
e: mlambie at thefrontiergroup.com.au
f: +61 (08) 6263 4444
m: +61 408 866 997