Chat plugin?
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Hi guys,
What Facebook like chat plugin can you recommend for BuddyPress?Cheers,
Maria
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I use Cometchat, works well. No compliants here besides it can be resource heavy if too many users which is understandable.
Hi Julian,
Yes, this is a cool plugin, but I’m after something where you can write a message from the BuddyPress profile to another user and then it kind of is already a chat – like on Facebook.@juliantrueflynn hi m8, i haven’t used cometchat but i have read about it and i believe they have a push service to help with server load if you have too many users at once do they not?
I believe this is charged per how many messages are sent etc, have you tried this service from them at all? im curious!
I also believe you have to have caching correctly configured (either apc or memcached) for it to be utilized efficiently.
What I mean is this: Right now, it seems users can only send “standard” messages through the wordpress/buddypress messages system, or chat through for example arrow chat or Cometchat.
To be able to view all messages (chat messages and “standard” messages between users) in the same place (like in FB or any other modern platform) would be a good improvement. Or perhaps simply throw out the regular messaging system and be able to add the chat to the profile?
I don’t understand what you mean because buddypress has private messages built in as standard.
@mcpeanut, exactly. There’s private messages built in, but this is rather old school. You can’t leave the conversation as you can on FB, you can’t upload files to the conversation etc. I am after something like Facebook chat/messaging system.
as the guy mentioned above cometchat or arrowchat will do this for you but for a whitelabel version (with-out the powered by logo) you will have to pay between $150 and $400 depending what features you want, then if you haven’t got a dedicated server and adequate serverside caching to deal with an excessive amount of chatters at once and you have a busy site you may also need to subscribe to their push service so you don’t grind to a halt ‘so to speak’ .
Hello,
I am Andrew from the CometChat team. Please email us at help@cometchat.com and we would be happy to assist you with a custom solution.
Warm Regards,
Andew
CometChat TeamPlease note that we do not actively monitor these forums, so for a speedy response, please email us at the above address.
There’s private messages built in, but this is rather old school. You can’t leave the conversation as you can on FB, you can’t upload files to the conversation etc. I am after something like Facebook chat/messaging system.
Personally I would like PM and chat to be separate. But then, things may change also – who can say – please submit issues with lots of real world example at https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/report
Some chat solutions worth looking may be https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=buddypress+chat
@rosyteddy, you do keep saying BP is free, and imply or state “so nothing will change”, actually look at the amount of development that is carried out in the core development teams free time, frankly it’s phenomenal, BP improves at an incredible pace. Some functionality may rightly be never forthcoming, WP is an app that relies a lot on plugins to extend functionality, BP is the same if you want this type of extended functionality beyond a basic level then it will probably always be thirdparty provided.
And you’re right there likely will be a comment like core getting too heavy, all this type of added functionality has to be maintained, it adds to the development burden in needing supporting, core needs to do the basics in as solid a manner as possible with additional functionality added in a carefully thought out process, like the member type api or attachments api.
@hnla Sorry, my apologies. Please also read “But then, things may change also – who can say –”
I think @mariatrier can get helped by your positive suggestions on her actual problem 🙂 Thanks.
@mariatrier Have a look at this page also http://barn2.co.uk/live-chat-wordpress-plugins/See also: http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-chat/ and don’t miss the revival statement at the top of the page.
Guys I have cometchat installed on a current wordpress site and I’ve had to deactivate it after much back and forth with their support team (who are very good it has to be said).
I bought the Professional Edition and also purchased the Comet Service to reduce load on my server.
Sadly it hasn’t worked out well.
Every time cometchat gets even slightly busy (30+ chatters in a room) it brings down my entire website. I disabled comet service and tried running it solely on my own dedicated server (which is pretty powerful 12 core / 64GB ram / 1Gbps pipe + 1Gbps burst) but the same issue kept happening.
After some debugging it all boils down to the fact that, whether you have comet service activated or not, the script “calls home” to comet’s servers every time somebody loads it in their browser. The problem that was taking my site out is that their servers couldn’t handle the load and were returning 504 errors which was wiping my site out (as the comet chat scripts are loaded aright after the opening <head> tag, preventing the rest of the site from loading).
They tried a few things to fix it for me, but ultimately the script still needs to contact their servers and their servers can’t handle the requests.
It’s a shame because it is a really good script and when working, works flawlessly. The integration with WP is brilliant, although, as mentioned above, any messaging done via comet chat stays in comet chat and can’t be translated elsewhere on your site.
There is this WP chat plug in that I’ve had to revert back to (had it prior to buying comet chat) but it’s a bit clunky and is a bit of a resource pig – https://wordpress.org/plugins/quick-chat/
It does work though. Hope that helps 😉
@mrgiblets regarding “a bit of a resource pig” – how much? Is it okay with “30+” chatters and the site still loads fast ? Quick chat page says “Before you install Quick Chat please check is you web server sufficiently capable to support number of users you expect visiting your chat at the same time.” but does not say how to check this. Thanks.
@mrgiblets hi m8, ok i am really curious now because i also own the premium version of cometchat and have done so for the past 18 months but i haven’t used it yet, i dont understand your problems mr giblet because isnt that what it is supposed to do when connecting to their push service? connect to their servers so that they can deliver the messages for you? now cometchat has been around for years and is supposedly used by 100s of thousand s of sites etc so why would 30 users cause a crash? if subscribed to their push service and you have a correctly configured server and sufficient caching running alongside cometchat (which they seem to recommend memcached) all should be fine should it not?
btw how are you testing this live scenario? have you got 30 users connecting from different locations in a real world test?
@mrgiblets just reading more and apparently with their cometservice and memcached (also setting up to run a cron job every 3 hours) and testing with over 10 thousand users on a 4gb vps your load should only peak at between 10-20 percent!
read this here http://www.cometchat.com/blog/cometchat-v5-1-handle-thousands-of-users/
maybee you have an incorrectly setup server because the description of your server is much much much higher than a standard vps
@mcpeanut yeah it is a weird one.
The server is set up and working perfectly. There is only one website hosted on there, but it is a busy one. The problem arises due to their ngix websever ,mine is apache2. When multiple people hit the chat room at once their nginx server throws 504 errors.
have you got 30 users connecting from different locations in a real world test?
Yes, the site is live and was tested repeatedly with real users from literally all over the world.
isnt that what it is supposed to do when connecting to their push service
That’s what I assumed would happen when using their comet service plan, and it does, as far as the majority of the weight on the CPU goes. Even with cometchat enabled their servers still throw 504 errors when too many client try to connect at once.
Like I said, I even took comet service out of the equation all together and ran it on my machine with memcache, same story. It’s never my apache server that throws the 504 errors, always their nginx one. If we weren’t using different software I would have probably never been able to diagnose that, but luckily these and all other server errors always tell you what software the web server is running.
The problem arises because every time a client on my site loads comet chat, the script contacts the cometchat servers (for what I assume is some kind of anti-piracy measure – they wouldn’t actually admit when I mentioned it but they didn’t deny it either).
I’m perplexed by it because I have seen comet chat for years as you say, I never dreamed I would have this kind of an issue with it.
They have been trying to fix it by rewriting mySQL queries and other things, but as it stands right now, if I was to reactivate it, the site would get knocked out until I removed it again.
Re: Quick Chat – It flies on my dedicated server but it used to start really slowing down on my vps (which had a pretty decent spec too – 6GB RAM) when it hit around 40+ users. At that amount it would start kicking people out of the room and taking ages to post messages.
If you only need it for a basic chat room for 20 or so people at once it does the job just fine, if you need it to cope with more than that I’d look elsewhere.Oh I should add, the last time I tested it there were only 14 people trying to connect at once and cometchat still threw the 504’s.
I suggested to them that they host whatever scripts are being called on a reliable CDN like S3.
I don’t know whether they will take my advice though?
It’s also worth noting that the cometchat site itself is usually very slow to load. I don’t know if they are hosting their callback scripts on the same machine or not but it all does start to make more sense when you take that into account.
Hmm , YES i know for a fact that they check for anti piracy and that your domain name is registered via your admin panel when you log into your account on their site, could this really be part of the issue? what if cometchat is in fact making that call for a legitimacy check every single time cometchat is accessed rather than them doing a one off check and giving it the OK flag? I dunno im just as confused as you by this and i haven’t even got mine set up on a live site yet!
This worries me a little as you don’t want expensive software you own doing things like this each time someone connects to your chat! this is obtrusive behavior when you own a white-label software product, the way they deal with anti privacy is their issue and not the end users problem who has genuinely purchased their product!
I know this is the case as i once installed it on a test server but had forgot to add my new domain name and got errors.
@mcpeanut if you want to see quick chat in action check it out here – http://www.d3ep.com/shoutbox
It will be dead in there now, but gets busy during the afternoon / evening hours (UK).
Bro I was about to buy the mobile SDK and brand it for our site.
The site is a live radio station and CC was taking down the entire site (not the audio stream as that is hosted on different servers), but it’s not a good look when people can’t access your website.
nice website man, where are you located?
btw read this post https://theadminzone.com/threads/adding-cometchat-to-an-active-big-board.99248/
Well I just assumed that if I was to run this on my own server that it would never need to contact cometchat at all, let alone every single time somebody visits your site. It really is overkill in that respect. I guess they could also be using it to collect user meta, but again, when you pay decent cash for something you don’t really expect that kind of backend activity going on.
Cheers mate, London.
Bloody hell….
65.000 concurrent connections on port 80 from cometchat files to the webserver
That is just insane!
Well again, while I was having these problems I went through my server records and even when the site was bombing out the CPU “spiked” at 6.3% which is nothing. lol
It certainly wasn’t my machine that couldn’t handle it, but if they are throwing out that many requests to a single chat instance, can you imagine how many they must be throwing out for the thousands of websites that are using it? It’s no wonder that their poor old web servers can’t handle it.
I will back up what that guy said though, their support team are excellent. Every single issue I had they have attempted to resolve (In fact in every other case they have, apart from this one)
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