Chat module, ready for the world?

Chat module, ready for the world?

by Arthur Hung -
Number of replies: 4

I'm using the http chat module for sessions of 20-25 people and was "warned" mixed many times by my ISP that my account would be suspended. I am so surprised that the site is still alive. smile

So I decided to see if there were any alternatives out there so that the crowd's need for chatting would be satisfied. wink

But after reading the discussion on the daemon chat module surprise(http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=10624), and trying it out for the first time. wide eyes It soothes the soul!

However, the question still remains. Is it safe to use the newest version (1.4.2) in a production site? or would it be better to wait for the next release of (1.4.3)? or perhaps (1.5)?

Thanks for making the world a better "chatting" world! Cheers! big grin

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In reply to Arthur Hung

Re: Chat module, ready for the world?

by John Papaioannou -
Hi Arthur,

The chat daemon is considered "final", in the sense that we don't plan to meddle with it in the near future unless of course it is for bug fixes (and there are no sufficiently documented bugs to consider right now). So any of those versions will do.

Of course, if there are bug reports they will be fixed as soon as possible and included in the next version.

Jon
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In reply to John Papaioannou

Re: Chat module, ready for the world?

by Kevin Martin -
sad

I've been waiting so hopefully and patiently for an upgrade of any kind to it on the off chance it might improve/solve my problems. This makes it sound like the solution simply won't come.

I tried and tried and tried to get the daemon method to work, and when it does it is VASTLY superior to the HTML method, but unfortunately for me, people regularly get booted out of chat sessions and sometimes can't get back in. This is a serious compromise of the professional image we try to show our trainees. And I should probably also mention, is parallel with almost every other chat system we've tried at the previous incarnation of our site, which was php-nuke based.

There are also ongoing problems with the userlist not showing for some users, and something else I can't quite recall right now. The HTML version of the chat is more stable, but users absolutely hate the lag of even a few seconds between posting and their post appearing onscreen etc.

In the end I had to bite the bullet and return to using Yahoo Messenger for the chats at our site, which is really lame in some areas, but has one strength - it is stable, in the sense that people don't often get booted out. But I do hate the fact that someone has to manually maintain an up-to-date list of current trainees, purely for the Yahoo sessions, as our chats are part (indeed, for many trainees, the most important part) of a paid course.sad
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In reply to Kevin Martin

Re: Chat module, ready for the world?

by John Papaioannou -
Kevin,

It's not that we don't care about the quality offered by the chat daemon, or that we don't want to improve it. Unfortunetely, the problems that do exist exist because of two reasons: a) browsers not behaving in any uniform way, but instead displaying erratic behavior; b) lack of solid, concrete feedback data that would allow us to reproduce the problem (how can we debug it otherwise?).

Let me also point out that there are lots of browsers out there, each one doing as it wants; for example, it's not just "IE": it's "IE5/Mac", "IE5.x/Max", "IE5/Win", "IE6/Win" and so on... sometimes even the operating system version appears to make a difference (MacOS 9/X did that, if I recall).

If someone can present hard facts, we can start working on improving chatd's behavior. Otherwise, spending the most precious resource in Moodle (man-hours of capable developers) in a wild goose chase doesn't promise to be very rewarding.

Please excuse me if the above sounds harsh at all, that wasn't my intention even in the least. But it goes without saying that currently chatd does not have any bugs that we could identify; otherwise we 'd have fixed them. So the real problem is the lack of data...

Jon
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In reply to John Papaioannou

Re: Chat module, ready for the world?

by Kevin Martin -
Hi Jon,

No, it doesn't sound harsh at all - I understand completely. I am currently spending several hours nearly every day providing support for problems with minor PHP scripts (written by others) which often come down to unexplainable errors for one person/site that simply do not occur for any others. It is very frustrating, especially when there seem to be so few factors to look at as the possible cause. I often have to look at the browser as the "well it must be this then" factor, as all other avenues have been eliminated (at least to the best of my ability).

For an example, the latest one, yesterday, I just happened to notice one difference between the site where a plugin script was not working and all the others where it worked perfectly. An anti-spyware product I have (Pest Patrol) blocks the cookies on this site, but not on any of the others. What that means in reality, who knows, as Pest Patrol tells me no more details than the fact that it blocked/deleted that cookie. I'm guessing it wuold tell me more if I paid them for the product, but I'm in neither the habit of, or position to, pay for 'Pro' versions of anti-spyware products when I have no way to know if there will be any real advantage to me (Spybot and Ad-aware seem to do a great job in combo anyway, for free). My point, anyway, is I understand there are seemingly untraceable factors, and none of us has time to spend all day chasing down a bug that may or may not ever be found - we all have livings to make, which have to come first for obvious reasons.

Please understand my post was not meant in a critical sense - more an expression of disappointment - that the chat daemon is unlikely to be upgraded, and also in chat software in general. I'm yet to find a really decent/stable chat client outside IRC itself - and I have tried quite a number. Some of the Java ones work great -for *most* people. But most is not really what is needed in a professional environment is it? At any given point we may have 15-20 trainees in our program, and if 1 or 2 of them can't use the chat, which is a core part of the service they pay for, it's just no good. Hence we end up going back to IM software, of which Yahoo seems to be the best. That just means the associated problems I mentioned with monitoring enrolments so only the right people get invited each time, as well as manually posting transcripts of each chat meeting to a forum in moodle. Painful, but tolerable (hey, there's far worse thigns in the world to complain about if you ask me ;) )

Thanks,
Kevin

PS: My shortlist for what I think are the biggest buggers in this issue: browser variations, OS variations, cookies, malware.  Alas I can't see any apparent detour around any of those problems.
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