Please consider this a beta!

I've got it up and running for the most part. You can do what's most important: chat!

I've spent more time focusing on speed and performance than a bunch of useless flashy features. From my testing thus far, it is quite fast, considering it is all mySQL driven.

I've created two rooms for now:

Lounge
Free for all

The lounge will be the main chat room for everyone to enjoy peacefully. That is to say, once we get these chat rooms active, the lounge will be moderated and offenders will be warned, kicked or banned. The free for all room does not have the same rules attached.

To see what the rules are for a room you are in, write this where you write a message:

/rules

I will be following conventional IRC syntax with many commands, so having some experience with IRC will be handy (especially if you are an op, since kicking and banning will be done in the same manner).

If you are already in stealth mode on the site and open up the chat, you will automatically be chatting anonymously. You also have the ability to chat anonymously even if you aren't in stealth mode - just tick the respective box. Chatting anonymously will assign you the same unique ID that you see here in the chatter box, and your name will not be present with any of your messages or in the list of users chatting.

The chat room is only open for members of this community, and it most likely will remain that way (due to an inability to prevent spam bots).

If you close the chat window, you will automatically be timed out after five minutes, but as long as you keep the chat window open, you will remain "chatting".

I haven't worked on any of the access list functionality yet, but I hope to have that together by this weekend.

You will also notice that you can only be chatting in one room at a time. This will hopefully also be changed shortly.

The list of chat rooms will also be changed, and more will be done with the overall design to let you know where you are, and so on and so forth.

Once I get more of the functionality together, and once the appearance of the system is a bit less bland (a bit, mind you), I will create another button for "chat" to go in with the rest of the control panel buttons (home, members, settings, profile, etc..)

If you are on chatting frequently enough, and you show you are mature enough, I'd love to have you as an operator. Your duties will be nothing more than passing time with others on, and ensuring people are abiding by the rules.

Since this is a pretty big feature, and since it is in its infancy, I am sure you have lots of suggestions, ideas and feedback. Please feel free to provide any of your thoughts or suggestions thus far in this item!

UPDATE:

- Flood control in effect (it's currently set to 1 second, since I don't want to be too restrictive. There is also a mechanism to prevent the same message being posted multiple times back to back)

- Private messages can be sent within a chat room using the following syntax:
/msg lev message text goes here

- Private messages may also be sent to stealth members using their unique identifier. If their name shows up as "STEALTH MEMBER 411", then sending a private message to the user is done like so:
/msg 411 message text goes here

- Clear the message buffer (clean the window of present messages):
/clear

- Reveal the identity of a stealth member (For moderation purposes only, so normal members won't be able to use this!)
/unmask 411

- Name highlighting; each username has its own color to make association of messages easier. Colors, scheme or style may change...

- Silent (or private) messages are highlighted in yellow. These are messages, or system responses, which only you are seeing. Anything highlighted in yellow is visible only to you.

- Colors have been removed both for usernames and silent messages. I will probably re-instate them at a later time, but I would like to come up with a full class for color manipulation, because I am not happy with the inverse tones I am getting now. I thought the yellow highlighting on silent messages looked tacky, so silent messages are now appearing merely in italic.

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» posted by: Lev · date: 4:11 - 21 August 2008	rated: N/A
The auto-ping function should also make a call to Online::Register in order to keep the user "active" on the "who's online" list for the rest of the site. Maybe also a function that shows when a user is typing (like IM programs)... of course only if it doesn't slow things down too much, which I have a feeling it will... Worth a try. A sound to play when a new user comes into the room (for when you aren't always looking like me). Or, maybe even one to play for new messages. Both should be options under settings, if implemented at all. ~~~~~~~~~~ "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" - Douglas Adams levlive.com
Tainter of Thoughts (31344 AP) » total items: 1970 · total posts: 2400 » 0.857 / 0.571

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» posted by: Lev · date: 4:07 - 21 August 2008	rated: N/A
The auto-ping ajax call that occurs is causing the ordering of the names to change! Can be a source of annoyance for some. ~~~~~~~~~~ "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" - Douglas Adams levlive.com
Tainter of Thoughts (31344 AP) » total items: 1970 · total posts: 2400 » 0.857 / 0.571