full-featured dedicated chat room software needed

[hobey19]

i am doing a project for an NPO and one of the things they would like since they don't have a central office is a chat program based on their web server they can all log into. they would like it to log all of their conversations if possible, and have both public and private conversation capabilities (ie a chat room option as well as regular one-to-one communication). i have never really heard of anything like this, but i figured you guys would know if it existed. thanks a bunch

craig

[mairving]

What kind of server?
How much in the budget?

[kstatefan40]

A cheap option would be to go with a IRC client in a java applet and set up logs. There are services you can buy to do this, but I'm not sure. I remember Dris tested one a while back - I will ask him when he gets back on Monday and see if he remembers.

[hobey19]

actually, i found one, and best of all, its free. it also integrates nicely with mambo cms, which they use, so i am very happy with it.

http://www.x7chat.com/

thanks for the help

craig

[mairving]

Originally Posted by hobey19 actually, i found one, and best of all, its free. it also integrates nicely with mambo cms, which they use, so i am very happy with it. http://www.x7chat.com/ thanks for the help craig

You might tell them about Mambo CMS. I would suggest that they go over to Joomla. A couple of weeks back all of the core developers left Mambo in a disagreement with Miro, the parent company. They formed their own CMS called Joomla. Miro has found some new developers but most of the component people have followed the developers over to Joomla. They just release Joomla 1.0, which is essentially Mambo 4.5.2.3. I did the upgrade on a couple of servers and it was painless.

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[Statica]

As a suggestion (I don't want to detract too much from your original request), have you considered running a bulletin board/forum instead. Often times, when people tell me that they want a chatroom deployed to keep in touch with people across the country, they actually are thinking of the functionality of a forum; it does allow for a "public" conversation. It does allow for "one on one" contact. It does much more, like searchability, being able to have "conversations" without the constraints of it being with people who need to be online together... also allows a division of subjects.

[hobey19]

Originally Posted by Statica As a suggestion (I don't want to detract too much from your original request), have you considered running a bulletin board/forum instead. Often times, when people tell me that they want a chatroom deployed to keep in touch with people across the country, they actually are thinking of the functionality of a forum; it does allow for a "public" conversation. It does allow for "one on one" contact. It does much more, like searchability, being able to have "conversations" without the constraints of it being with people who need to be online together... also allows a division of subjects.

thanks for the suggestion. they already have a forum set up, but they need the ability to have real-time conversations, which is why they suggested a chat-room style set up. but i agree, the forum works perfectly for everything else, and i believe they will continue to use it.

as far as joomla is concerned, mairving, i will pass the word along. i looked into it a little bit when i started looking at mambo, but i didn't realy give it a second thought, only because my host (dreamhost) allows for a one-click install of mambo. if it is that much better, i will definitely be interested in making the switch. thanks for the info

craig