The Song Fight Bulletin Board

This seems to work OK. I would recommend using Firefox, though, and using the Adblock and NoScript extensions to make sure you don't get any adware. The popup window has an iframe along the bottom that loads new ads every couple seconds, from various ad networks, some of which may or may not be reputable. I guess any solution that's free and requires little/no setup is likely going to be ad supported, so this is probably OK as far as they go. I also minimized all the sections of the window other than the chat transcript.

What do other folks think about it?

I enjoy it, but those ads bother me. Especially the scary clown ones. Thanks be to JB for setting this up though - when more people start using it, this could be pretty cool.

It keeps flashing and not loading anything. Just a grey bar on the bottom freaking out, and transferring/waiting all the time.

:/

I can see no redeeming value to this solution.

You are stuck with their stupid interface and their annoying ads. It doesn't do anything that IRC doesn't do, and the lag time is ridiculous The animated ads make it so that I can't even type in real time.

If people don't care enough to download an IRC client, I would assume that chatting with songfight folks is a very low priority for them.

SPUD

I can't think or type fast enough for chat rooms anyway. Plus, when a bunch of people are chatyping, the shiz scrolls up off the screen before I can read it.
I have enough trouble following the bouncing ball at the bottom of the screen of my favorite sing a long cartoons.

At some point while I was on the chat session, Norton told me that it had found (and isolated) four "trojan horse" files on my machine. Two Downloader.MisleadApp items and two xrun.exe files. I can't say for sure that they came through the chat application, but the date on them was one minute after the date on my "confirmation email" file. I opened, but did not click on the link in the confirmation email.

I ran a scan of C: afterwards and it didn't find anything, I'll run a full system scan tonight. You might want to poke around in C:Documents and Settings / (username) / Local Settings / Temp and see if you see either of those files, if you do, turn your virus checker loose on them...

I may have accidentally clicked on one of the banner ads on the bottom, but the cursor does seem to jump around a lot, and I think if it jumps to the ads just as you're ready to press return, that might be the equivalent of a click on an ad...

Charles

Works fine for me. But Erik doesn't talk. Not that I have a lot to say other than I'm jet lagged and Oceans 13 is even worse than Oceans 23.

Oh, and slide the window down so the ads are below the screen and ... there are no ads. Although there is a notice that our sponsor is the Miami Gay Blog. Not that there's anything wrong with that...

I just turned on Web Ad Blocking in my browser (Maxthon) and it nailed every one of the 40 or so ads it tried to serve me in the 3 minutes I sat there waiting for Spud or erik to say something

Bjam wrote:It keeps flashing and not loading anything. Just a grey bar on the bottom freaking out, and transferring/waiting all the time.

:/

This was happening to me until I told NoScript to allow scripts to be run from googleanalytics.com (or whatever the Google Analytics domain is). Your browser may be trying to protect you from cross-site scripting attacks. In this particular case, it's ok to run the code from the other site, I think. And it seems that, without it, the UI doesn't work at all due to a JavaScript error about part of the Google code not being found.

Like I said, browse safely, don't allow strange JavaScript/etc. to run on this page if you can help it.

I do agree with Spud that the lag was a bit lame, but it didn't render it useless.

doesn't work at all for me - which is a shame, because I have a lot of very important and interesting things to say

JB, see if your hosting company has a php chat installation available for your account. It would be along the same lines as the wiki service... just a different brand tie in.

PHP Open Chat System is the one that gets itself bundled into most hosting software... you might be able to ask for it by name.

what about a jabber conference room hosted on songfight.net?
(i've never used these conferences, but i think dreamhost has them easily available)

-craig

dreamhost doesn't offer a phpbb chat thing, or a php chat thing.

dreamhost does offer a jabber chat deal, but i dunno where to get a jabber chat client that will sit in a web page. if anyone does, lemme know and we can try it out.

i'm not sure that jwchat will work on dreamhost, but you can create an account there (at jwchat.org) and use their web-based client to connect to a songfight jabber conference room

-craig

I've used JWChat at work and on geneticmail.com, and it's pretty good. The guy who wrote it also wrote something that's basically a simplified version of JWChat that aims to make it easy to just put a group chat window into a Web page:

http://zeank.in-berlin.de/muckl/

I haven't tried it, so I can't say much about it, but that plus Dreamhost's Jabber server support might work.

EDIT: If you do want to use JWChat or MUCkl, there's a simple patch you can make to improve the perceived responsiveness. By default, it doesn't show a message you send until it receives it back from the server, which causes some apparent delay. A simple tweak can change it so it puts your message content into the chat window right away.

I tried the demo and the responsiveness seems pretty good. That's basically exactly the kind of chat i want. Just enter your nick and go.

I'm not seeing much that's very encouraging when searching for 'jwchat AND dreamhost'. I haven't even been able to figure out what Jabber server Dreamhost uses. JWChat and MUCkl would require that either their Jabber server provides a special function (HTTP polling or binding) or that you can set up and run a cgi/servlet/etc. to provide that functionality. It seems like, from what searching I've done, their server doesn't have the necessary functionality, so you'd have to run something yourself to provide it. The easiest thing out there is a Java servlet written by the guy who wrote JWChat, but I don't think Dreamhost does Java, right? So we may be SOL on that front, unfortunately.

I think Hoblit may be on the right track. Maybe you can install PHP Open Chat yourself somehow?

http://phpopenchat.org/

Except that the last release of phpopenchat is from 2005. :-/

Lunkhead wrote:JWChat and MUCkl would require that either their Jabber server provides a special function (HTTP polling or binding) or that you can set up and run a cgi/servlet/etc. to provide that functionality.

i think it's the web server, rather than the jabber server that requires that functionality, so jwchat on any server that *can* run it will work wtih songfight's jabber. of course this is moot if you require it to run on dreamhost.

-craig

JWChat only communicates using HTTP, while Jabber servers natively use XMPP, so you need something acting as a gateway, translating between those two protocols. You either need to have the gateway/translation functionality built in to your Jabber server (as in Jive OpenFire or ejabberd), or you need to run some process like a cgi or a Java servlet (as in JabberHTTPBind) to add the functionality to your Web/application server.

The Dreamhost jabber server is pretty much useless for the purpose of providing chat to people anyway. It's really just for (manually) setting up your own Jabber presence. (It's how I have fluffy[at]beesbuzz[dot]biz as my main Jabber address.)

If you have GMail (including GMail for domains), you have a Jabber account (namely your email address).

If you have Livejournal, you have a Jabber account (username@livejournal.com).

The only value in providing songfight.org's Jabber functionality to people is so that they can get a whatever@songfight.org Jabber identity. If you want to come up with a "premium" service that you can sell to people who really want to support Song Fight, that would be a useful case for it. But the whole point to Jabber is that you DON'T need an account on a particular provider in order to talk to other people.

For group chat, IRC is really the way to go. I'm with Spud on this one.

Oh, but if you just want to embed a quick-and-easy 'chat room' function into the site, try gabbly.com. It seems to work kinda-sorta okay. It's still pretty stupid though.

http://www.gabbly.com/songfight.org