BuddyPress.org

@atfpodcast – this has been brought up in the support forums a few times – you could search the forums for “chat”
For basic no frills chat room and bp I would start with the free “quick chat” plugin in the wp-repo – I use it on a couple of sites and it’s fine for most.. if you chat or and server gets busy you may want to move on to something that does not rely so much on using mysql.. I posted some info at the bottom of one of these following threads about that

I would suggest perhaps starting here:
https://buddypress.org/support/topic/chat-plugins-with-one-to-many-messaging/#post-241066

https://buddypress.org/support/topic/chat-plugin-recommendations-2/

Search the forums and you will find more discussions about these – I can only post two links in this reply so can’t be more specific with a single post.

Your mileage may vary – but I have not had any good real world use with ‘comet chat’ nor ‘wpmu’s chat plugin’ – chat systems that are free almost always use your sql database for message storage and require a bunch of back and forth ajax like server requests – fine if you have less than 20 people chatting on a dedicated server – not so good when it gets to be more than that in my previous experiences – some of the other chat systems rely on third party servers – which puts you in a position of giving away all of your users data to others, dealing with the fact their servers are out of your control and may not work all the time – stuff like that..

read the other convos for more details I guess..

@atfpodcast – If I were you I would start with the free “quick chat” plugin from the wp-repo – if your site is a bit more serious then I would get the av-chat dot net system from nusoft – it would be about $200 for the level of action your system is seeing (plus a vps or something (maybe a digital ocean droplet?) to handle the red5 streaming thing) – I am having good luck with the wp integration and the av-chat system, it also works with BP, logins, avatars… and they are active developers. Many customization options – and currently my favorite system.

Almost everybody on this world has a Skype account and I was looking for a long time for a plugin that seamlessly integrates with Buddypress.

Finally found Skype for Buddypress by uicoders.com. It works like a charm. Setup in 2 minutes and you’re ready to rock!

This is the one that you really need to reach more people and to increase engagement on your Buddypress site. You don’t need special server setups like RedHat, etc, etc. Just install and rock! This plugin saved my buddypress platform … kudoooooooooooooosssssssssssss for the guys at uicoders.com!

Never used Skype before? 🙂

You can videochat and also text.

I was looking for this plugin for years and finally got one and it works perfectly on my Buddypress site. A really must have for every social networking site!
easy to setup: download, install and you’re all set. Few clicks, 30 seconds bingo!

No only with persons you are chatting with. You’ve never used Skype before? With Skype you can videochat and text to…. if you would like to stay anonymous (just switch off camera).

If you want videochat with chatrooms, groupchats => Skype for Buddypress by uicoders.com

If you only want a simple plain texting chatroom => try tinychat. Have tried that too but it’s buggy.

@atfpodcast – quick chat is working 24/7 on my busiest bp site with 11,000 members.. only thing that screws up that page is when rtmedia has an update the screws with permalinks (messes up all of my static “pages” – have to change and resave.. but that is an issue with rtmedia and permalinks – nothing to do with quickchat.. it works fine and I deploy it on different sites in different ways. I did some write up about it on one of the comment threads I originally linked to in the first response to the original post I think..

anyhow, I think quickchat is the perfect text-chat plugin for a small web site that does not hammer the chat system with hundreds of simultaneous users.

It does chat, avatars, bad words filter, admin can delete stuff – it’s quite the package – I wish the original dev would of answered my emails offering some paid enhancements.. but it’s fine as it is. I did a long write up on one site talking about the drawbacks of ANY chat system that hooks into sql – but I doubt most people will run into those issues until they get more than 20 or so same-time chatters – that’s when you start to look at things to limit sql requests to keep your server from choking – which is usually more of an issue with robots and scrapers and brute force login stuff – comment spam – all that.. guess that’s more of a slightly different discussion – lol.

@kookidooki
LOL –

There’s no other party involved when using Skype.

I suppose you might also think when you store your documents in one-drive or dropbox that you are the only person who accesses those also. Everything that is typed or said using skype is monitored and recorded for later use by many people, and automatically scanned for certain information of interest to various parties. If your business is selling stationary I guess that may never matter.

If your discussions could be used as leverage in any way by people with different interests, then I would consider a basic encrypted chat service you control. Even using the free firefox “hello” videochat would be better privacy than skype.

I also think you should point out to others in your sites privacy policy that you are sharing their conversations with multiple organizations and agencies when using these third party services out of your control.

Anyone using their site for legal issues, healthcare info, or other private matters should definitive read the policies of any third party messaging services before using them. – Just my humble opinion – I’m not a lawyer or anything.

You could of said skype was private way back in the day before microsoft bought it and changed everything.

Answer from atfpodcast is here.