Alright well I have a question about chat scripts. I frequently visit another forum and they brought up the idea of adding a chat room. Some people tried creating rooms in chat programs such as Yahoo messenger and AIM... but that caused problems because other people didn't have the programs (or didn't want to download them) or didn't know how to find the room properly. So I went ahead and installed chat scripts to my site to make it all a little easier for everyone. Ok, so the first one I tried was;
Java/CGI Chat Room
This one was pretty OK. I thought it did the job alright, but I had some users complain that it didn't have a side-bar showing who else was in the room. It was also a little lagged, so I decided on trying another script to try and get an improvement. I installed;
PhpMyChat Room
This one was HEAPS better, in my opinion. It offered the option to register your nickname and I just found the whole layout a lot better. It also showed who else was in the room, so I thought it was perfect. Then I realised the lag. This chat script seems to refresh every 3 seconds or so, so it is quite slow, and when you have a few people trying to have a conversation it can get very difficult to follow what's going on.

Now my question is, how can improve on this? I like all the features of the PhpMyChat Room but I hate the lag. Maybe there is a way to increase the refresh rate? Or if not, could somebody recommend another script that offers the same features as this script, but runs faster? If nobody knows of any, that's cool... but if someone does know of any other scripts that I might like I'd appreciate the heads up.
Thanks.

PS. I apologize if this is in the wrong forum, but I couldn't think of a more appropriate one. Mods, if this should be somewhere else feel free to move it (as if you wouldn't just do that anyway ).

Excellent thread topic, JB! Especially since the admin of a small chat group I belong to, wants to switch from Yahoo chat to MSN chat. With MSN chat , ya gotta sign up for their .NET passport thing. At least with Yahoo chat, some of us could use a mic/speaker set to talk to each other. Unfortunately, Yahoo chat also bumps everyone out within an hour of entering the chat room--so inconvenient to have to re-enter the chat room.

I don't know if MSN chat has the talk feature that Yahoo has, but I'd like know if any chat scripts have that talk feature. In fact, do any of them offer a videochat feature?

Why it's updating every 3 sec is because if it would update every sec it would probably lagg more. But if you can edit the script should you be able to change the refreshrate.

Well maybe I worded it wrong... but it's not actually lagging as such. What I meant was when we have a few people in the room trying to chat, and they're all talking constantly, we only get all their messages all at the same time every 3 seconds, rather than when they actually send the message. I know 3 seconds is quite fast, but when you have say 10 people all talking at once it can get hard to follow what's going on because you'll get 3 or 4 messages all at the same time every 3 seconds.
Bah, well I'm going to stop trying to explain what I mean here, I'm bad at explaining stuff... but I hope you understand what I mean. What I would like is something very similar to mIRC. Are there any scripts out there that will run a mIRC channel in your website? The only time you get lag with mIRC is when you have a slow internet connection, or just a bad connection to the server.

Hi..

a useful chat tool I've utilized on my website is the IrcQ WebBased Chat Panel.. its easy to use, you can locate and join rooms with ease.. you can create a room on a remote IRC server and invite people to it.. etc.. it's very versitile as a web-chat front end.

The chat GUI supports :
Multiple rooms
Choices of IRC servers
Choice of Alias

The script to add the chat to your site through a HTML or PHP page is available at http://www.icq.com/panels/ircqnet/

An example of the script in use is available on this page on my website www.rashidahmed.com

The one severe drawback is that Windows users who have not updated their OS or have not installed Java Runtime will be unable to access this feature, although by and large, most Windows updating happens automatically and you could always adda link to the Sun website allowing your users to install Java.

Now however IrcQ Chat is available as a flash plugin too.. so its just paste your code and you're up and ready to hit the chat servers...

Hope this helps .. all the best..

R.A.

I found this PHP/javascript chat the other day:

BlaB! Lite

I really love it! I set it up (which took no time at all) just to see how it worked, and I think it's great! I'd show you my working demo, but stupid plex6.com decided to change my hosting plan from $4/mo to $9.95 so I cancelled it. Anywhos, I highly recommend this chat. It's really fast, and fairly easy to customize with your own colors and graphics, too. Rated a 10 with 166 votes in the PHP Resource Index!