Face Book Chat

[chappo12]

is there any chance of making a face book style chat thing.

 

that way if you have to ask someone something you can do it quickly

 

i no it would be hard and you would have to be able to block people but thought it might be good and stop forums getting full of crap

 

 

 

cheers

 

steve-o

[KENut]

I like this idea. I think it was being looked into previously?

Or I've been thinking, even just a thread, for random but easy/quick to answer auto questions.

Like an offtopic chat thread thing.

[irokin]

Definitely possible. I'll have to have a big think about what the best way to implement it is. Which ever route I go it's going to involve either moving to another server or an additional server. Thats not a problem, it needs to happen sooner or later anyway, but its going to increase the roll out time.

 

So yes, its something I'm interested in but no it wont be ready next week :)

[JiP]

Not a bad idea, tho hope it'd work way better than FB chat.

[chappo12]

wait so something i said was a good idea

 

I'm impressed with myself

[chappo12]

my other idea was some thng when you log in that has all the last 5 fourms or so that you posted in like the one we have but it does have to have what you postede just the forum topic.

 

I'm for ever writing stuff in forums late at night and thenj get on the next day and forgot were and what i wrote

[irokin]

wait so something i said was a good idea

 

I'm impressed with myself

 

 

Strangely enough I was thinking about the same thing at work yesterday. :)

 

 

What are the main failings of facebooks system? I don't really use facebooks and I'm not about to start. The underlying server systems will be the same though the front end will be different.

 

Probably the major advantage we have is that we don't have to serve 70 million users like facebook.

[Undertaker_is_the_best]

yea thats a pretty cool idea seening how it is one of if not the biggest person gathering website around

[Toy-Yoda[RL]]

Does no-one use MSN any more? Or say, you know, a phone? :)

 

I may well be in a minority, but I'm against a facebook style chat system for RC, at the very least, if you HAVE to implement it, please include the ability to shut it completely off.

[Raven]

Does no-one use MSN any more? Or say, you know, a phone? :hmm:

 

I may well be in a minority, but I'm against a facebook style chat system for RC, at the very least, if you HAVE to implement it, please include the ability to shut it completely off.

 

Not all users use MSN and no all like to give out their mobile number....

 

But yes, have the ability to turn it off or at least "appear offline".

 

The main gripe with facebook chat is it constantly drops in and out.

 

If you're going to use a facebook style chat system, i'd much rather go the route of a chatbox instead and "buddy" adds to stop randoms from messaging you for stupid things.

Edited February 18, 2010 by Raven

[7shades]

The JZX forum has a good system.... Shoutbox at the top of the page, which when clicked goes to a completely separate page with online users you can select and chat directly with, or start a group chat window.

[chappo12]

i don't like face book chat myself

 

just used it to explain

[Redwarf]

Or we could just all talk about ourselves in the third person:

 

"Redwarf is feeling very silly and really should go to bed...."

Edited February 18, 2010 by Redwarf

[irokin]

Or we could just all talk about ourselves in the third person:

 

"Redwarf is feeling very silly and really should go to bed...."

 

lol

 

I think this will be like the pm system but geared towards conversation more than the email style Pm system. I thought about having it so that you have to be on a persons friends list to be able to chat to them but I think the easiest way to do it is to just allow people to choose to be available to everyone or just switch it off. Either way it will be your choice to use the system or not, I'm not here to force things on you that you don't want.

 

As for using MSN/phone/someothersystem, there needs to be a common medium or protocal. For everyone here that common medium is Rollaclub. By far the easiest way to allow Rollaclubbers to talk to eachother is for Rollaclub to provide that. Yes you can do it via PM, but its tedius and not geared towards conversations. Providing phone numbers is going to be an absolute invasion of privacy. Its easy to block someone on a chat system, not so easy to block them from calling your phone from phoneboxes in the middle of the night etc. As we've already had a former user reported to police for abusive phone calls I'd like to avoid that happening to anyone else.

 

Shoutboxes I've tried in the past, theyre clunky (but I could use BOSH), annoying, shouty and populated by idiot comments most of the time. I'm not intending to provide a mass (RC wide) communication system with the chat system, it will be an msn/gchat/icq/aim/whatever style I'm system. If you need the mass communication then you should be starting a thread not shouting at people in a chat box. I'm not sure at this stage if you will be able to invite multiple people to a chat, I haven't got that far into my dev research.

 

My intention isn't to turn Rollaclub into that godaweful, difficult to navigate, clunky, flashing lights, counterintuitive, bells and whistles piece of crap that is facebook so never fear.

[irokin]

I've got a little test system up and running. Servers working well and integrates fine with our user database. Only major issue was people who have spaces in their name *glares*. The xmpp protocal doesn't allow for spaces but I've worked around it by replacing spaces on the chat server only with dashes. Even if there were a username conflict it would just result in one or neither being able to login. Shouldn't be possible to spoof another persons session because of the way the authentications setup.

 

Also server side, you will need to add a user as a 'buddy' and have them approve it before you're able to talk with them. There is the provision for global chat rooms though the client I end up using will determine whether they're used or not. Also the server does store messages sent to a user who is offline and delivers them once they come back online. Should solve the issue facebook has with not delivering messages. While it is the same protocal it's not the same server side software as facebook.

 

Client wise theres a bunch of options. I had hoped to get a facebook style bar working but that particular piece of software is buggy as hell. It will connect but for some reason the way its storing the session id isn't correct and the server disconnects it as soon as it attempts to refresh the BOSH connection. So thats a bit sucky. I will keep trying to get it working but we probably won't launch with that. I'm not sure if (I don't think) it persists connections between pages either so theres always that issue.

 

I might post up some screenshots of the possibilities with an RC style layout and maybe demo the favorites. Most of them behave like a typical desktop messenger program, flash and make noise when you get messages etc. None of them are particularly obnoxious about it and you can turn that off anyway. I've shown Teddy a couple and he likes them, but he likes everything I show him :P hehe. Its also possible to use desktop messengers, I've tried pidgin and miranda so far but any xmpp messenger will (should) work.

 

Beyond that all thats left to do is transfer my local testing configuration to a live server, little bit of integration and away we go. Like a lot of the RC things I've been getting done lately, turning out to be a lot simpler than I first thought.