17 replies to this topic

[tomsk]

I don’t know if one exists but I would like a chat room software that allows two people to connect together but gives a random user name or password.

What I am trying to achieve is that I sell a service it generates a username or password to then go into a chat room. But once that chat room is shut down those details become useless.

Any thoughts?

[Raphael]

*shrug*.. Conceptually, this would not be hard to do, depending on which language you picked to do it in. Browser-based, I'm guessing, then your front end is going to be Java or Flash, I suppose. Your back end can be anything. I wrote a multi-threaded chat server with support for different rooms in PERL, about 8 or 9 years ago. You could do it in C++ or Java or even PHP if you really wanted to.

[linux_lover]

Flash comms server is pretty good for that sorta thing - but a bit pricey licence.

[OldWelshGuy]

I think that could be achieved from coming at it from a different angle maybe. I have an idea but am afraid to throw it open now for fear of making an pigs butt of myself I will think about this and post again later.lol

[Raphael]

post! post! post!

[OldWelshGuy]

Ok then how about doing it with cookies and setting the cookie expiry to throw them out of the room when it expires after the set time. Sort of pay as you chat type stuff?

I know this is not really 100% secure as someone in the know could technically pull the cookie and gain access, but how many are going to know how to do that?

[Raphael]

Oh, well, I guess there's lots of ways you could do that bit. I was just thinking about the actual tech behind the chat server part =)

[tomsk]

So nothing of the shelf available , does chat room software itself exist? along the lines of msn?

OWG if I could have so that the user has a pay as go type arrangement that would be good?

[OldWelshGuy]

I would imagine that you could have a buy now page, and depending what page they were taken to, the cookie could be set to time out to the required value. I am not a coder, so hopefully the coders will come along and put me right on the feasability of this.

There are plenty of chatroom software stuff available, try hotscripts or sourceforge.

[Randy]

Sure. Passing a variable to dynamically set a cookie would be a piece of cake. Just have to do a bit of referrer checking too, or check against an invoce number in a database to make sure nobody was cheating your system.

Or you could potentially write a default cookie and then update when they're in the chat area with the information pulled from your database. That's probably the safest way to control any potential funny business.

[Haystack]

So nothing of the shelf available , does chat room software itself exist? along the lines of msn?

Take a look at Hotscripts. There have quite a few chat programs worth checking out.

[Randy]

What Ed said.

There are literally hundreds of chat programs out there. Since I don't use any of them I, for one, am hesitant to recommend something specific.

[tomsk]

Thank you all I will take a look at the scripts.

[greggb]

Thank you all I will take a look at the scripts. 

You could also check IP addresses. That's not 100% accurate, but if you combined it with cookie verification, I'd say you'd be on about 99.9% of the time. You could even use a session id as a URL parameter, for that matter.

[linux_lover]

You could use JS setinterval to make a little countdown script... and then use php/asp etc to update database records of available random passwords etc.

As i said before, Flash could do all the frontend/chat and php the db stuff / or you could use perl/java for chat with a bit of js/php.