Hi all,
after banging my head against the wall for a while with the chat daemon failing after a certain period (around a day, see other posts), I'm looking at getting a developer to integrate an alternative. This seems interesting and I was wondering if anyone has experience of using it or knows of any other open source (or not) chat software.
Matt
Last year I used sigma chat (http://www.sigmachat.com/) with no technical problems what-so-ever. They provide a simple html script to plug into a moodle web-page block and I was off and running with NO bandwidth issues and 0% downtime. Having said that, it is a java applet and several of my students simply could not configure their systems to run it (this was a small number - about 12 out of 150). In addition, it was not a free service. It cost me about a hundred dollars for one year. Although I did not have access to the database directly, I had the option (which I used) of having the student's chat transcripts mailed to me. So, as you can see there are pros and cons to an off-line chat server. The biggest con being, in my opinion, that I had to rely on my students to enter the correct chat room and use an identifiable username. This then led to hours of sorting with excel to calculate grades. I am hopping to avoid this with the new moodle chat daemon, as the moodle chat has all of the pros that I require with the exception of the burden it is placing on my server.
Hi Matt, could you elaborate a bit more for the chat daemon failing problem that you were encounting? Which Moodle version you were using and did you use the original chat module came with Moodle? Also did you try any of the jabber servers (see http://www.jabber.org/software/servers.shtml) as an external tool as an alternative solution to replace Moodle's chat module? Many thanks!
We might be testing the PHPOPenChat that you mentioned, and will keep everyone posted.