The first question is How is the Chat module written? I gather from previous discussion that a lot is in PHP, which I don't know well. Can one add modules in Perl? Several of the suggestions below I could write myself, if I can insert a Perl module in an appropriate place (and if the people running the Moodle version I'm using would allow it.)
I used the chat room with my class, with only 2 people showing up. Nonetheless, we had an interesting discussion, and I saw several problems which shouldn't be too hard to clean up. (And possibly already have solutions that I haven't found in the documentation.) The biggest problem was undifferentiated discussions, with several topics intermingled and no good way to go back to review what was just said a little while ago, but was scolled off the screen (because the 5-second refresh brings the page back to the bottom.) So, suggestions:
1. Allow a way to mark comments, perhaps color code them, perhaps some other method. The could be labelled similarly to what Eudora does for email: Priority (highest, high, normal, low, lowest), or color labels -- something so that certain messages would stand out from others. The priority or color could be assigned by the writer, but could even be limited to just the teacher, to mark important points.
2. Allow "freezing" the window (to prevent updates, temporarily), so you can scroll backwards to look at a discussion that has gone off the screen. Even better would be to divide the screen into 2 pieces, one of which was updated, the other not - but I don't know if that's easy or hard to do. (I know it's possible, because some of the text editors do it.)
3. For small chats (10 or fewer people?) you could even choose separate colors for each person, to make it clear who was saying what, again as a way to help differentiate the discussions.
4. Finally, perhaps an easy way to quote text for the chat room, for people who don't know html. I believe you can use
tags and such, but it would be nice to have a more Moodle and less HTML way of quoting things, to keep columns, to send special characters, etc.
-- Stan Isaacs