Creating a Chat Room

Chat rooms can be a neat addition to your website. However, you should as well know that they have certain requirements:

1) They may suck down your bandwidth, especially if you have video option there or just alot of visitors.

2) Scripting support on your web host. Chat rooms can run on Perl, Java etc... so make sure you choose the right chat room or web host. Contact your service provider if unsure! One thing to say about this is that usually paid web hosts have their almost standardized script supports, for your chat room too.

How to Install a Chat Room?

Usually installation is simple, just dragging and dropping the files, configuring the chat rooms and copying and pasting the needed script on a page.

The chat room packages provide installation readme so consulting with it brings up the details.

Recommended and Free Chat Room

I recommend ChaNT as your chat room. It is an open source, free web-based chat system written in PHP and JavaScript. It does not require any browser plugins like Java or Flash. Included are privacy features such as traffic encryption. It has a powerful admin control panel. Simple to install, very fast, it is light weight and makes chatting more fun.

Download ChaNT chat room script from here!

Here are ChaNT's installation instructions:

1. Download the ZIP archive

2. Extract the package to a suitable location on the server's hard drive

3. If you are using Linux make sure the 'data' & 'logs' folders is writable (chmod 755).

4. Check that you have the file '.htaccess' in your 'data' directory.

5. Open http://your_site/install.php in your web browser.

6. Follow the Installation Wizard

7. Remember to delete the installer after finishing the installation.

Good luck and happy chatting!