Comet Chat - Interesting Find For VB Live Chat Extension

[anthonyparsons]

Most of my sites are Joomla based, VB or a combination. So today I was looking through some JomSocial additions and found Comet Chat... which integrates with vBulletin. I have used FlashChat for a long time now, but it is boring for what really is around nowadays.

Comet Chat is amazing to say the least. It does cost more than FlashChat, starting at $50 for the branded version, $130 unbranded and you can pay more if you want them to install it. I have played with the demo and love it... so when I have some time, I am going to buy this one and see how users like it. It is a FaceBook style IM / complete chat room facility in one, with vbulletin integration, avatars, profiles, etc etc.

I had never seen it until just 10 minutes ago... so maybe others may have it or know more about it, or for those who are looking for more serious and professional chat integrations for their board.

http://www.cometchat.com

I will certainly be able to give feedback on this one myself in about a week, when I have finished other projects and have time to divert.

[Dean C]

Some arse has changed all the logins on vBulletin. But nevertheless, this is pretty much useless to anyone who is on shared hosting or has over about 50-100 active users online. To run such an online chat system you need to heavily optimise communications and PHP/MySQL is definitely not suitable for this.

[1QuickSI]

Went to check it out and none of their pre-assigned user IDs/passowrds work. Nor does creating an account.
Not a good first impression.

[anthonyparsons]

Why is that Dean? I read it said it was ok for shared hosting as well... or is this because of the way you are referring to it communicating with PHP & MySQL only, ie. not through something like RTMP or such?

[RoG Shadow RV]

i have this on my site, its a great piece of work

and for sites with bigger users wont be affected, it only puts people in your friends if you have them added as a friend on vbulletin

[anthonyparsons]

Ah... so it doesn't just work based on all the users online, but the same as FaceBook do... friends. Very nice. I can understand what Dean was sort off saying then now, in that if you had thousands of members online and it put them into your IM, how that could crash the entire thing or make it useless. It all comes together... Thanks RoG... Excellent to have experience shared on this.

[Dean C]

Why is that Dean? I read it said it was ok for shared hosting as well... or is this because of the way you are referring to it communicating with PHP & MySQL only, ie. not through something like RTMP or such?

PHP/MySQL together don't work well for on-demand chat. People with shoutboxes on their forums know all about this. You need to use totally different technologies to achieve things like this, and don't believe for a second that this will scale well on shared hosts. It will *work* on a shared host, it doesn't mean it won't grind your server to a halt and cause your host to kick you off their service though This is obviously not a problem for small site owners, but if you have 100+ users communicating at once you'll see problems.

[anthonyparsons]

Excellent, thanks for that Dean and much appreciated. I was a little skeptical over the shared hosting aspect... not an issue for my own uses, though I do like to understand possible implications of using something. I get that... as I had read things before across the forums about shoutbox pitfalls, hence why I had never used on in any of my own forum installs before. Thank you very much Dean... more to contemplate and research.

[TheComputerGuy]

addoninteractive

I pay $18 bucks a month instead of the yearly fee...but much happier.

[kyrgyz]

addoninteractive

I pay $18 bucks a month instead of the yearly fee...but much happier.

Same here. Used to pay yearly, but went for a free version as usage dropped. People love participating in forum discussions, but not chat encounters. I guess it's the same trend as choosing texting over cellphone calls.

[anthonyparsons]

Now installed and been using it for a week... very nice indeed.

[mhackl]

Does it integrate itself or does it have to be modified?[COLOR="rgb(47, 79, 79)"] Also, is it compatible with VB4.x?[/COLOR]

[the geek]

If you have more than 10 people online at any time it can really eat up your resources. Every page load it pulls all users online and formats it in the popup box. Each page load. Each user. Have 250 users browsing your site online and your users will notice.

I modded it to only pull a users visible online friends which radically helped but ended up removing it in the end as it would freeze browsers. Bummed too as i liked the product. http://www.arrowchat.com/ is supposedly pretty good and worth checking out.

[anthonyparsons]

By default it actually only uses your friends list and from that, only those that are actually online. Any past issues that occurred, I am not seeing them now with it. It integrates itself and I had exactly zero issues installing it, changing the settings, etc, by simply reading the instructions first and then doing it. After reading, it took me around 5 minutes to have it installed, tweaked and running. A novice could install it in under 15 minutes at worse. The only change I made was it links to Googles jquery, being a third party site, and I like everything running from my own server.... so I installed the jquery version onto the server it needed and linked it that way, otherwise, mine is stock standard and works like a charm on a ServInt VPS.

Like Dean stated above, not sure how well it would work on something like a shared host, but if you have a high-end VPS or decent dedicated box, I don't see any issues with hundreds of users on the system.

[the geek]

Thanks for that Anthony - they must have changed that as I had to mod it that way last time I downloaded it. Maybe they have improved the browser freezing issues users were having on my site too.