ocPortal.com's chat room

Greetings,

So after a bit I got to use the chatroom here on this site, and chatted it up with Puran.

There were a couple of things that I noticed that I thought I'd share with you guys.

1.) It takes a bit to load the chat initially. This is compared to the built in ocPortal chatroom, which loads almost instantly for me while this ZO HO chat took a good 5-10 seconds. Not terribly long, but in the world of internet apps… that is long lol.

2.) There is a lack of a "Who's Chatting" display, that while not important, I missed. It made me feel like the room was empty until someone finally chatted.

So I have to ask, why did you guys choose ZO HO chat instead of using the default ocPortal chat? IMO, the default ocPortal chat works better, is more connected to the website, giving room for things like private messages and the like, and shows who is in the room so you know it's not just an empty room if no one is talking at the moment.

ZO HO, while minimal looks like it is lacking more than it provides. The only reason I could think is that perhaps to save on server resources.

I second that.

Well where are all those chatters?


Waiting Puran

1. Server resources (there's a specific technique called 'COMET' that these advanced chat systems use that ocPortal cannot implement because it requires server-level coding)
2. Zoho can hopefully soon support Jabber…
3. File sharing…
4. Screen sharing (they support it all already for private chat rooms).
5. ocPortal's chat also doesn't have any kind of embedding functionality, so sharing it across domains wouldn't work without a fair amount of effort.

We did try and go with a Jabber frontend of our own a while back, but it was highly troublesome, taking a few days to get working initially, then extricably broke as soon as we added just a little extra complexity to our server configuration. The Jabber servers out there are incredibly complex and have loads of bugs and few implement the part of the protocol needed for a web frontend and to make a web frontend the solutions are all pretty buggy and unsupported (to get it working initially I worked around about a dozen bugs).
So I just decided in the end it was better to just let a third party system do it all rather than continuing to pour time in that direction.

Zoho has a forum for chat ideas at Zoho Forums - Customer Support and Feedback Forums for the Zoho Suite. I've already posted a few myself, I'd suggest anyone else does the same.

I was thinking it was probably something to do with server resources. That is an understandable reason with a site the size of ocPortal.com. However I would think that with so few actually using the chatroom, this would be almost a non-issue, and showing off the ocportal default chatroom could bring greater gains.

Curious, why is jabber support so desired? To use your messenger client as a means of connecting with the chat room?

Yeah. Personally I consider it a huge deal for people to be able to use a desktop tool to connect to ocPortal chat. I hate having to use a browser window as if it was a background desktop app, they just weren't invented for it IMO.

Yeah I can see how that would be a big gain. Thanks to facebook's XMPP support, I use kopete to chat with my facebook friends. Admittedly it would be nice to be able to chat in my site's chat room with kopete or similar multi-client IM device.