AJAX Chatbox for Pascal developers?

[WILL]

phibermon has reached out to me and proposed the idea of starting a means of a live chat system designed just for our little community that will allow PGD and non-PGD members who use Pascal to chat live among each other.

I believe his key point was best said...

"I'm hungry for realtime chat but find a lot of game programming rooms often shun pascal developers and find the pascal related rooms devoid of game coders."

Obviously referring to the existing #FPC and #Lazarus-IDE rooms over on the Freenode IRC servers.

IRC was mentioned, but we tried this a while back and I don't think that it lasted too long. Besides this seems a little bit old of a concept in this day and age of digital communication. We later discussed another idea that I liked.

One of the ideas he presented to me was something that caught my eye the most and that was a seemingly simply, yet sleek looking web script called AJAX Chat. Use of Flash and Ruby is optional, but I doubt that we'll make use of Flash so that it can be run on all your iPads and iPhones. Also there can be multiple rooms where a different category of topics can be discussed to prevent congestion if traffic picks up among a group already in discussion. It'll be up to you guys how you want to organize the rooms.

Does this idea seem to interest you? Would you stop in for a chat and like to discuss issues with others live? Would integration with the PGD website make this more attractive than old and dull IRC clients?

Who would be interested in having a live Chatbox on PGD that people can talk with each other live kind of like IRC, but a bit more modern and in more of a Web 2.0 way of chatting?

[Matthias]

This is an interesting idea. I'd prefer an integrated chat (against IRC). I'd avoid flash. For me probably the forum based discussions are still more interesting just because they aren't live.

Nevertheless it's worth a try.

[phibermon]

Naturally I'd like to see it but I lack the history to state if I believe it would be extensively used or not. I'd certainly be keeping a session open, chatting or answering questions but with that said, I shall have to play devils advocate with my opinion :

A real-time chat, if utialized by people to answer questions; may potentially rob the forum of the discussion.

Chat logs would be inherently more difficult to browse for answers, being only partly mitigated by having topic specific rooms (which would in turn divide up the locality of chatters)

If 'chat happens', it would most likely be better, in terms of the PGD forums as a resource; to encourage on-topic questions to be asked in the forum.

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Fighting the other side of the coin, I believe that real-time communication can paint a stronger picture of community and it may serve to turn more guests into members or to strengthen the participation of existing members by making PGD feel more 'alive'.

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Hopefully the poll will collect enough data to provide a statistically signifigant result. I've taken to pretending to be a C coder on IRC just to avoid being flamed "You're writing a game? in Pascal?!? hahahahah" etc etc

[WILL]

Did I mention that there is a Demo that you can try? Check it out if you are interested: https://blueimp.net/ajax/

[code_glitch]

I was looking for a 'Maybe... Depends on implementation' option but then I realized the only two where 'yes' and 'no'. I said yes, simply because the IRC during the Ludum Dare compo has a great feel (any LD competitors, you know what I mean, sleep deprived coding and helping each other out on there - a real sense of community) so during compos or other events based on a fast(er) timescale, a live chat would be great - but while IRC is great, pretty much anyone can log on including spammers etc, flash is just, well, horrendous but AJAX sounds good or a regulated IRC would be perfect IMHO.

Just my two cents.

[phibermon]

I've experimented with the demo (https://blueimp.net/ajax/) and it looks good! Perhaps there are alternatives but should an implementation be pursued, this looks perfectly suitable (their statement of VBulletin intergration is promising)

code_glitch : I've been a fond user of IRC in the past but yes I agree, spamming is rife. Regulated IRC unless supported by some custom bot would add a layer of complexity to site admin tasks.

Such a solution as the proposed, given it could be configured to use VBulletin authentication; would provide an uncommon spam-vector and would have minimal impact on the sites administrative tasks (a ban in VBulletin is a ban in AJAX Chat). I'd wager that the uncommon combination of VBulletin + AJAX Chat is unlikely to be targetted by existing spamming scripts but then perhaps I under-estimate the persistance of spammers!