Online Web Chat Software?

frooyo asks: "I have been looking for sometime now to add the functionality of web chat to my website. I have been having difficulty in finding free (open source) software that allows for a moderator and N number of registered users to chat on my website. These projects look promising, but we'd like to know what others are out there. What do you use on your website for web chatting?"

Comments

How do I put chat rooms on my web pages?

[vasqzr]

Welcome to 1996!

Next up:

MIDI music
Flash
Annoying Cursors
VBScript
Useless Java Applets!

It all depends.

[Anonymous Coward]

On what functionalities you want. Probably one of the most full featured would be the Ethereal Realms., although, it's probably far beyond what you need/ want (and system intensive, from what I've heard from people running it).

It's more of a chat system, than simply a chat room.

Code http://sourceforge.net/projects/ethereal-realms/
Website: http://ethereal-realms.org

And yes, it's released under the GPL

IRC

[jalet]

Why don't you install Dancer+Dancer-Services and then the EIRC java applet ?

Works like a charm.

Re:IRC

[robochan]

IRC is definitely a good way to go. I use IRC and a web based client myself, and you don't even _need_ to run your own IRC daemon either. A channel can be set up on any public network, and you can almost always point the web based clients there.
Clients/daemons are only a sourceforge/freshmeat search away...

If...

[hookedup]

You've got no problems with using php/mysql for this, check out hotscripts.com php section. Lots of free (GPL) scripts there for you to try out.

CGIIRC

[FinestLittleSpace]

http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net/ is a brilliant IRC > web client, and is massivley customisable, as well as having a very very helpful creator/developer who'll respond to your needs. Try it.

chat systems

[Eric'sGoddess]

Personally, I use Aerial Chat(configured on my site: http://www.cataromance.com/chat/xindex.php -- the project: http://freshmeat.net/projects/aerialchat/). It's the one I settled on after trying out at least a dozen others. The problem that I've found is either they're difficult to set up or they don't work on everyone's computer. This one has a safe mode for older browsers. What I'd really like to see in a chat is the ability to moderate the chat when we have a guest speaker. Still waiting for that option. If anyone knows of a good one, let me know! :)

Try Voodoo Chat

[Hollinger]

Go look at Voodoo Chat. I know of several sites that run it. It allows for moderators, kicking / banning users, and user profiles. It works pretty well, IMHO.

MCH

PHPMyChat

[jptechnical]

PHpMyChat comes with CPanel which is an extremely popular web hosting management package, so you might have it available and not even know it. PHPMyChat is also freely available and totally customizeable. After editing the css files I was able to make the window very small and nearly borderless so it is very lowkey for my wife whose boss treats all the employees like children.

You can create users and private rooms and and all kinds of other stuff. Just type /help for a popup window with commands and instructions.

HTTP is just not a good chat protocol.

[mellon]

HTTP is a really lousy transport for a bidirectional chat. It's really a question-and-response protocol, and things that speak it generally follow that way of doing things. So when you try to chat over HTTP, you wind up having to have some kind of timeout mechanism that refetches the web page every second in order to get decent interactivity, and it still provides a lousy user experience.

I would recommend instead that you go with the Jabber protocol, which is a much better choice for chatting. Nice, friendly, free clients are available for all popular operating systems. If you really want it to look webbish, you can always use a java web app that speaks jabber. This should give you a much nicer user experience.

Re:HTTP is just not a good chat protocol.

[Anonymous Coward]

you wind up having to have some kind of timeout mechanism that refetches the web page every second in order to get decent interactivity
----------------
That's just in a theory. In practice, a lot of browsers (IE>2, NN, Mozilla, Opera>6, Konqueror, even links) support 'stream'-mode (actually, it's just a html-rendering during downloading). So user connects to the server and than retrieves new content (f.e. new chat-messages) without any refreshes. Server just doesn't close a connection but writes new content in it. Not in RFC, but works :)
sorry for my english

I wrote a crappy one....

[titaniam]

When I needed a chat program, I just wrote one that uses a continuous html output. When you view the page the program gives you the latest comments, then hangs until more comments are added by someone else. Then it writes the output over the still open connection and hangs again... The program dies upon prolonged inactivity or if the same ip address requests the page again. When you submit a comment, a new page view gives you what you just entered and anything else typed in by others. I really fear for my webserver by posting this link (due to the way I implemented the chat, it is not good for large numbers of users at once), so it will "disappear" temporarily if trouble ensues: My chat program. Let me know if you like it, and I'll pass you the code, written in Perl. It is very minimalistic, but intended to be at least viewable on any browser that can show a page before the whole document is loaded. No download of software, such as the latest java version (and short simple code) is a big plus.

Slashcode?

[Feztaa]

You could use Slashcode, IIRC they have a half-decent demo of it in production.