Online chat

[Watchmanz]

Hi there,

I am trying to find a specific chat product and I am wondering whether someone may be able to assist me.

Like any website owner I am looking for a good chat software package to encourage visitors to my website to chat. However, I wish to be able to offer my visitors the opportunity to do more than just chat in a chatroom restricted to my own website. I am trying to find a way that visitors can click on the chat link and be given a list of rooms to visit, one of which is the website chatroom but others which are public chatrooms where people from around the world are chatting. In this way, visitors to my site would have the opportunity to chat in real time with people from all countries who are not chatting through my website, but through any website that offers a similar system. I guess I'm looking for a browser chat community network?

There is software that allows me to do this utilising IRC but I am after a browser chat format that does not employ IRC.

The website is new in terms of being a meeting place for visitors (was previously just a homepage) but is liaising with other websites for a forums network, and I wish to do the same with chat rooms. We hope to publicise this website heavily in the near future. One advantage with a chat community of course is that the chance of somebody finding the chat room empty would be minimal

Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope to hear from you soon - hopefully with good news.

[DarkAngelBGE]

Actually, I would prefer a forum community. Why ? Because when having a chat community time zones play a role. What if somebody from Australia wants to chat and thus he lives in Australia never finds anybody to chat if your main audience comes from Europe ?

On the other hand, forum maintenance and executing a code of conduct is much easier with the administrative tools of these days' forum software.

To really make sure your chats don't get spammed or bad language is used you must have mentors in each chat the whole day. Meaning you would need a big staff (who may want to get paid). You know spamming and bad language may scare a big part of your potential audience off.

Hope this helps.

[Watchmanz]

I understand what you're saying and I agree with you. However we already have a forum community that we are trying to build up, together with mirrored forums from another forum community. The idea of chat is to give those forum members the ability to chat together, as well as being able to chat with others. Nothing is worse than having a chat room on a website which is continually empty. I agree that timje zones play a difference but 99% of our members are from the one timezone, or within 2 hours of that timezone, and the site is aimed at people from that region. Consequently, it may pose a problem for some users but these will be in the minority. As to language, I would be looking at software that contains filters for the obvious indiscretions and some form of loggin so I can check should complaints be made. Other than that I don't believe in moderating chat to a high degree, unless I am given a reason to do so. Thanks for the suggestions though - I have taken what you said on board.

Actually, I would prefer a forum community. Why ? Because when having a chat community time zones play a role. What if somebody from Australia wants to chat and thus he lives in Australia never finds anybody to chat if your main audience comes from Europe ?

On the other hand, forum maintenance and executing a code of conduct is much easier with the administrative tools of these days' forum software.

To really make sure your chats don't get spammed or bad language is used you must have mentors in each chat the whole day. Meaning you would need a big staff (who may want to get paid). You know spamming and bad language may scare a big part of your potential audience off.

Hope this helps.

[DarkAngelBGE]

Well, alright, that sounds good to me then. On to your problem: Do I understand you correctly that you want your chatters to chat with chatters from another software via your software/window ?

[Watchmanz]

Well, originally I was looking for software that I could run on my website that would allow users, once they had clicked the link, to access a general chatroom where users from a lot of other websites were chatting also. There is software like jIRC that allows connection to the IRC network where users can do this but I was looking for non-IRC software. I've had a look around and there doesn't seem to be anything that does this sort of thing .... so after talking with a friend we determined that maybe the best bet is to have chatroom software loaded on one server, with many websites linking to it.
The software would give access to independent chatrooms for each website as well as one general chatroom, and all websites partaking in this would link to it.
Now we are trying to evaluate which free chat software is the best - to allow us limitless "rooms" plus the ability to modify colours etc based upon each website. Do you have any thoughts or recommendations in this regard?

Well, alright, that sounds good to me then. On to your problem: Do I understand you correctly that you want your chatters to chat with chatters from another software via your software/window ?

[DarkAngelBGE]

I would have a close look at http://www.chatjet.com/

Hope this helps.

[Watchmanz]

Thanks for that - I'll have alook at their website.

I would have a close look at http://www.chatjet.com/

Hope this helps.