Chat Room

Cant wait for the chat's return! Need to catch up with my OLS buds

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Originally Posted by Mantis

Why are you so negative, Ram? Back when the chat room was here, it was used a lot and many members enjoyed it. The fact it hasn't worked on your forum which has much less activity than mine doesn't mean your experiences apply to everyone else's. You have my personal guarantee that at least 90% of those who had used the chat room would want it to make a return. The reason why the chat room was taken off in the first place was because of the CPU usage, and you'd know that if you had read related threads.

Anyway, I almost have the chat room sorted out now. I've just got to figure out a few things. I'm sure it will be up by the end of this month, but most likely much sooner. This new chat room will have absolutely no impact on the server.

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I don't see anything about being "negative" from my previous post. You want opinions, I gave you one with detailed reasons. :) No need to call those who oppose the idea "negative".

So you basically have had the same CPU usage problem as me when the chat room is in place. It is one big reason why it shouldn't be there. The chat room plugin is poorly made. A few lines of mere words shouldn't take much CPU usage at all. During my trial of chat room on my forum, it took 90% the usage while it was some simple chat between two people. That was totally screwed up on the plugin part. :thinking:

My site's host is Hostgator. They put a 25% limit on each web site on the server. Since mine went up 90%, they made it so my site was only visible to me and not anyone else... so I can fix the problem. Took them a day to restore my web site after I told them repeatedly it was already uninstalled.

The other problem I see with a chat room on a forum for chat is what I've already said earlier. Forum is for people to chat. If you have chat room, it will become competition to your own forum sections. Forum sections will record every post and make them available for search engines and all visitors. While what's in the chat room will be gone.

However, forum is for people to chat in a manner that it does not require immediate reply. If you find it absolutely necessary for immediate back and forth chat among the members without being able to save the chat content for search engines and other visitors, then the chat room is a good tool to use. :)

I was calling your attitude negative because you outright said the chat room shouldn't return based on your own experiences when you hadn't seen the chat room in the first place or how much members enjoyed it. The fact many have requested its return should be enough testimony to that.

You made the same mistake I did, then. I learned that these chat plugins absolutely guzzle CPU usage. However, back when my site was using a different host, the server was less populated and thus the chat room performed much better. You mention not being able to save the chat, but I have a whole year's worth of chats logged. I could easily make a thread about the funniest moments in the chat room if I wanted to.

It was when I moved to my new host that I had less of a CPU quota. As with your host, when an administrator hits a certain CPU limit they are "throttled", and sometimes sites are taken down completely. The mistake therefore is that these chat plugins should only be used on dedicated servers. I think they'd work well on dedis.

I don't know if you know much about IRC, but the web applet will be loading data from another site, and most IRC channels are hosted on external IRC servers. Despite IRC being an old technology, it's very customisable and I might be able to add bots. It's also easily possible to create logs of IRC discussions, and members can use Windows/Mac/Linux clients to enter the chat room without having to access the forum.

I'm not as bothered about a chat room taking away forum activity. However, in the past I have considered making the chat room only "open" in certain hours of the day. This is a good way to counter the problem you describe. I'd still be allowing members to chat, but with offline hours for the chat room, discussions would be taken to the forum instead.

I think you're considering post counts a little too seriously. This isn't just a forum. It's a website, and I want to make that clearer in the future when I expand the other sections. The most important thing is that visitors have fun. The chat room is a great tool for that.