Category: Product

Compare between Chat Service and Chat Software for radio shows?

You spend time and money in building your online radio show website. You have a great player software to play your audio and music. But you wish to have a way to engage those listeners that like what you have to offer. The best way is using a chat-room next to your live audio stream. This will allow you to easily talk to your listeners, get their remarks, feedbacks and change the playlist if needed.

Chat rooms are a great way to create a live vibrant community.
It becomes very easy this days to add one to a website. There are many options in the market. Now, in essence, you will need to choose between 2 type of chats and once decided this will make pinpointing your preferred vendor  easier.

  1. Type 1 : Install a chat room software on your server .
  2. Type 2 : Add a hosted chat room where you do not need to install anything on your servers.

Chat software

The pros and cons of each choice are detailed below.

Chat Room Service 

With chat service, you add a small piece of code to your HTML page (snippet).
And you are done. All is being taken care of.

PROS

  • Easy to add
  • Create several chats with a click.
  • No upgrades are needed, all is being done by the chat room service providers.
  • No servers to maintain.
  • No extra man power is needed.
  • No performance issues when the server is loaded with users.
  • Create many chats as you like with a click.
  • You can design your own chat room style.

CONS

  • Monthly subscription to cover maintenance costs and the servers and bandwidth costs.

Installed Chat Room Software

A software is something you buy and install on your shared server or on your dedicated server.

PROS

  • One time payment normally for one chat.

CONS

  • Require installation. Not always easy.
  • If installed on the same server as your web-server, it might cause slowness to the whole site in case the chat is loaded.
  • If you use a shared hosting, you probably will not be able to install a chat as hosting companies avoid this kind of potential server load.
  • You will need to upgrade your server when a new chat/feature will be released.
  • You should keep your server maintained.
  • Make sure you have the extra man power to deal/test it.
  • Might cause performance issues on your server that might result in the upgrade to your server.
  • You may create only one chat room.

To sum it up, the logical choice would be to install a hosted chat room (meaning using a chat service) and not install a software as the world find the cloud hosted services as the future and in the long term it saves a lot of money (and frustrations).

Posted on by Editor

RumbleTalk hidden trick to disconnect all chat users with a click

As a chat owner you have the ability and the desire to control the conversation. There are several ways to actually control the conversation like deleting posts or sending private messages to users (pay attention message, warning messages), but many times a chat owner will need to disconnect a misbehaving person.

The common case is disconnecting a user that sent a forbidden message, image or video (forbidden according to the chat room rules). Chat owners can have several steps as mentioned before disconnecting a user (like sending personal messages to the user to stop what he is doing). In case a user is not willing to change his ways, the chat owner may choose to use a soft disconnect.


This means that user will be disconnected and see a warning message.

After 2 seconds from disconnecting, the user can return to the chat room, but he is considered as being warned. In case the person is still not behaving and act as a troll (spamming in the chat room), he then can be banned by IP. This is a hard ban where a user cannot return to the chat from the same computer (IP ban).

Many times, a chat owner wishes to disconnect all users in a chat room. There could be many reasons for doing so. For example you have a quota of 50 people which means only 50 people can be logged in to the chat. Now 30 of them just left their browsers open, so they consume most of the number of chatters allowed. You can ban the users one by one OR ….

The Hidden Feature

One can ban all chatters from the chat in a single click. The secret is called OFFLINE CHAT. When one change the status of the chat to OFFLINE (check the checkbox), the chat will be changed to OFFLINE, kick all users and show a message to all users opening the chat. The message can be edit to include your own message, you can even add HTML tags.

Note: As RumbleTalk supports 30 languages, all messages will show in the language chosen for the chat room.

Posted on by Editor

Case Study: DittyTV using chat box features worth knowing

I know, this is a case study, but first let’s talk about good design. Just before we start, let’s clear up the fact that this is a design post about the ability to design your own chat box style. This means that one may use the various chat box features to integrate and design his own chat theme.

Deign chat box features

Here is an example of how simple to create a great design using the powerful tool that let you DIY. In general, there are 4 ways to design your own chat style.

  1. Chat Skins – choose from our pre-made chat room designs
  2. Chat advanced design – easy to create your own style via quick visual settings.
  3. Easy CSS  – this is for advanced designers. If you know CSS you can create your own custom chat room.
  4. Floating icon – if you choose to use a floating chat (in oppose to in-page embedded chat) you can also design your own icon style.

From time to time we see a great chat design made by capable people.
One that worth mentioning is the chat box designed in the dittytv  (American music television) website (see above). They use advanced CSS design in addition to designing their own floating icon. They choose to have a transparent background so the chat looks as part of the actual website design.

If you like the design, you can give them a like.

Posted on by Eyal