Chat

Status/Roadmap

Review of 1.9.4 Chat Operation

• Things that work:
  • Rooms:
    • Users can move between rooms
    • Rooms with different update times seem to operate at the correct update rates.
  • Messages
    • Basic messages post on posting users screen in blue
    • Basic messages post on non-posting users screens in black
    • Private messages do not display on posting users screen
    • Private messages display on the recipient's screen in red
    • Private messages do not display on non-recipient's screen
  • Purging messages
    • If the purge time is set down from 1440 to something small for testing (15min), the purging seems to work properly
  • Browsers
    • Internet Explorer seems to work
    • Firefox seems to work
• Things that are questionable
  • Private messages stay at the bottom of the screen - not chronological with non-private messages.
    • This may be considered a feature - not sure what is typically done with private messages on chatrooms.
      • I don't like this functioning this way. Another box would probably be better, or leave the private messages in line with the others if possible.
  • The messages are currently cleared on a 1440 minute basis - with note to change to preference setting
  • Not sure what criteria is being used to update screens - how many messages? how old?
    • It seems that all messages for a given room are displayed to users that enter the room. (last 24hrs with current purge setting of 1440)
    • It appears that there was an attempt at some logic to only send messages since lastmessage. Not sure how this was supposed to work. This may have required the javascript coding that appears to have been abandoned in favor of direct print statements.
  • Users display
    • Current users in room does not always seem to be correct.
      • This needs checked with multiple machines - I'm using multiple browser windows on one machine to test.
• Things that could be added:
  • Timestamps on messages
  • Room entry notifications when new users enter rooms.
  • Room exit notifications when users exit rooms.
  • block out users selectively
  • assign colors to users
  • Logging - there are references to this in the code, but I don't think it is functional.
• Very Strange
  • Clicking on a username in the active users causes the whole tiki site to try to display in the user pane - on the user's information screen. (Firefox, IE)
  • Notice: Undefined index: lastMessage in /var/www/html/tikiwiki-1.9.2/tiki-chat_loader.php on line 83
    • I think there may be some problem with the lastMessage logic that should be used to determine which messages to display for each user session. This message appears the first time a user logs in to a room. As soon as the chatroom updates once the message goes away. maybe lastMessage is not properly initialized.

      
      

Wishlist

Open

Pending

Closed

Interested community members

Demo

None available or does the community eat IRC for DogFood?

Standards and/or other software

http://tiki.org/tiki-directory_browse.php?parent=53

Other links

The chat feature seems to be abandoned on the development front. - This statement was not true - there has been work done on the chat files since v1.9.2

The feature works to some degree in certain cases, but has some bugs that render it almost unusable.
Initially v1.9.4 seems more stable than 1.8.5 and 1.9.2

Currently Chat does not seem to work in some (maybe all) 'multi-tiki' installations (V1.9.2).
Updating to v1.9.4 files made the chat feature functional on my installation

Messages seem to make it to the proper database, but are not successfully fetched and displayed. I can't get any messages to display in my multi-tiki installation. - Works with v1.9.4 chat files

Chat logging is not complete and not currently implemented.

• Check this in v1.9.4

  
  
  
  

Ideas for the future

http://phergie.org/ An IRC Bot for PHP 5

Related

• Live Support

• Mini-chat