1,481 thoughts on “Quick Chat”

1. Marko Martinović AuthorApril 29, 2011 at 01:31:35

   I need help from you guys and girls 😉 I’m in the process of deciding on what to implement in the next 1.3 version. I was thinking to implement more secure scheme when it comes to chat user names. I consider making it like “A Fan” user recommended in comment #37, by the way “A Fan” thanks for the suggestion.

   The new scheme would be that registered users must use their login names as chat names, and non registered users get chat names like Guest-[RANDOM_ID]. That would be the default mode of operation. Besides that I would provide two check boxes in admin area for “Allow registered users to choose their chat user names” and “Allow non registered users to choose their chat user names”. With those two check boxes checked, mode of operation would be something like now. What are you opinions on this subject? Should I start coding these changes?

   Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it 🙂

   Reply ↓
2. Rishi April 29, 2011 at 02:02:07

   @Marko Martinović
   I think that as long as you give users the option to easily disable any features you add on (like the check boxes you referred to in your comment), we’ll be more than receptive. 🙂 Keep up the great work!

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3. Zoran April 29, 2011 at 12:15:38

   @Marko Martinović Yap, that’s good idea, anything that will prevent multiple users to have same user name.
   Are there any reported or possible problems with spam?

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   1. Marko Martinović AuthorApril 29, 2011 at 13:04:13

      Hi Zoran, I thought a lot about spam on chat. Adding captcha makes no sense because it would destroy the bare idea of live chat. Because of that QC does the following. It detects all links and turn them into clear text, and that text is then filtered according to forbidden domains specified in admin settings. So if org domain is on the list of forbidden domains, if someone posts any link to say somesite.org/some page, it will be replaced with **** signs. That’s as much as we can do without turning live chat into something non interactive. If there are any better ideas please come out with it 🙂

      Reply ↓
4. Zoran April 30, 2011 at 00:06:55

   @Marko Martinović
   I installed QC yesterday, with no real need for it, but it seemed fun thing to have on site.
   I’ll see how it works out (considering the fact that site belongs to political organization, my biggest concern are malicious comments) and I’ll keep you posted about eventual problems and ideas for improvement.

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5. Marko Martinović AuthorApril 30, 2011 at 01:04:25

   @Zoran

   When it comes to malicious comments, you can never really prevent it. Zoran, thank you very much for you interest.

   Reply ↓
6. RoOoMi.eXe April 30, 2011 at 16:26:33

   @Marko Martinović
   Hi Marko. how are u today?
   I speak to u about ofmy problem:

   @RoOoMi.eXe

   im testing this plugin in other my site themes. and get answer and i can send msg when i press the Enter. i dont know why i cant send msg in my theme.

   what is your idea and way to solve this problem?

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7. Marko Martinović AuthorApril 30, 2011 at 16:54:14

   @RoOoMi.eXe

   First thing I would recommend to try to turn off some plugins or switch theme. Basically if this chat doesn’t work 99% is conflict with users theme jQuery or other plugins. I understand that you can’t change your theme because of one plugin and that you may have more important plugins that QC, but besides functionality good plugins shouldn’t cause incompatibilities. I do my best to make sure that QC isn’t to blame for the conflict although there will always be some combination of plugin and theme that breaks it all.

   Today I will release 1.3 version where I have moved jQuery to separate file and did some steps to avoid clashes. But I can’t do anything if one buggy theme messes with QC jQuery and things don’t work. And last thing I don’t believe I am all mighty WordPress wizzard and that I won’t ever make mistake somewhere and cause incompatibility. I’m also learning as I go just I’m not afraid to admit that 🙂

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8. RoOoMi.eXe April 30, 2011 at 17:55:32

   @Marko Martinović
   Tnx sir. I try to Match my theme with this plugin.

   Reply ↓
9. Ian May 1, 2011 at 05:34:31

   @Marko Martinović
   Hi Marko, first thanks for the great plugin!
   One issue I have is that I see 403 forbidden error whenever I click “save changes” button in the admin setting.
   I checked that my directory permission setting is set to ‘755’ so guess there’s no problem in permission. Other plugins all works fine when I click save changes buttons, but I have 403 error with this quick chat plugin. Thanks for reading this.

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10. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 1, 2011 at 12:49:01

    @Ian

    Hi Ian, first thing you need to do is clean install by deleting from WordPress Plugins interface by clicking on the deactivate, then delete right next to deactivate, then got to “add new” and search for quick chat. I will look into this problem and keep you informed here 😉 Thanks for posting here

    edit1:
    Please look into this:
    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-fast-secure-contact-form-error-403-forbidden-when-update-settings

    It is possible that your server has mod_security activated and that it uses some kind of heuristics to flag things as threats and for QC it gives false positive. If that is correct you should contact your server admin. I will keep looking into it 🙂

    edit2:
    This site says that you need to disable mod_security trough .htaccess conf. You just create .htaccess file in the root of your site and put following in it:

    <IfModule mod_security.c> SecFilterEngine Off SecFilterScanPOST Off </IfModule>

    Cheers!

    Reply ↓
11. Ian May 1, 2011 at 14:17:19

    @Marko Martinović
    Thanks for the detailed solution, Marko. I really appreciate your support.
    Fixing .htaccess doesn’t seem to work for me yet, but that’s the problem of my server providers so will ask the SP. Thanks again!

    One thing I found is that when I compared Quick Chat plugin with all other plugins that work fine with me, when I click the ‘save changes’ button in the other plugins, the changes seem to be done within their php file, not going through options.php file.
    /wp-admin/options-general.php?page=xxxx-plugin.php
    and they work fine without turning off the security settings.

    The quick chat plugin’s parameters seem to be changed in the file under
    /wp-admin/options.php
    so it needs turning off the security settings to update the options.php param settings.

    I think this is the best WP chat plugin ever, easy to install and works great. 🙂
    Thanks again for the great plugin.

    Reply ↓
12. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 1, 2011 at 14:55:35

    @Ian

    Thanks Ian for looking into that and helping me debug, I really appreciate it 😉 I will check QC admin setings code and maybe update Quick Chat it if necessary. 🙂

    edit:
    This is the deal. To update Quick Chat options I use new WordPress API called Settings API added in WP 2.7 and that API uses options.php as target for plugins settings form. This is the preferred way of WP options management but “mod_security” obviously has some issues with it. Other plugins were not updated to use new Settings API so they work fine and use options-general.php as target. But i doubt that the new settings API is to blame. mod_security tries to guess is some action bad and it will always give some amount false positives. I would turn it off if it were my server because I like my software dumb 🙂 I don’t want my server guessing is my page in danger or not, you shouldn’t ether.

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13. Ian May 1, 2011 at 17:14:35

    @Marko Martinović
    Thanks for the reply, Marko. So it’s because many plug-ins have been existing before WP 2.7. Now I get it. 🙂 I should contact my Server Provider.

    I’m even gladder new plugin has the feature that prevents duplicated usernames! 🙂 Thanks again for the wonderful plugin.

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14. John K May 2, 2011 at 21:01:48

    @Zoran
    Especially needed is a block of someone using the HOST’S USERNAME. So to prevent imposters. Just as me not being able to use the username MARKO !!??

    Reply ↓
15. A Fan May 2, 2011 at 21:22:13

    Marko,

    I just upgraded QuickChat to 1.41 and am testing on WP 3.1. I noticed that a few of the plugin options are not saving properly. Specifically, these options do not retain their values when updated:

    * Allow guest users to choose their chat user names
    * Allow logged in users to choose their chat user names

    I assume it’s a minor bug with the options.php API use, but I haven’t looked into the details.

    Other thoughts:

    – It would be nice if the plugin didn’t try to load its JavaScript on pages that do not have the [quick-chat] shortcode on it. For example: if I only use it on one page, the plugin shouldn’t load any of the /quick-chat/js/* files unless the shortcode is on the page itself.

    – It would be nice to have a button on the settings page to purge all chat messages from the database. This would be especially helpful for testing purposes.

    – I think having an option to hide the emoticons or put them in a drop-down box would be nice, too.

    Keep up the good work!

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16. Zoran May 3, 2011 at 00:12:10

    @John K
    True :-bd

    Reply ↓
17. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 3, 2011 at 03:35:46

    @Zoran
    @John K

    If you deactivate options to allow guest and logged in users to choose chat user names (activated by default), that should do it. Blocking single names like admin, or admin login names has now effect cause there is always someone smart enough to write a_d_m_i_n instead admin or something like that. I’ll think about it once again and maybe reconsider my strategy but it seemed sound at the time of writing this last version upgrades 🙂

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18. Anonymous May 3, 2011 at 08:52:30

    @Marko Martinović
    List of restricted names for non registered users?

    Reply ↓
19. Mike May 4, 2011 at 05:51:38

    Hello,

    I’ve built up another wordpress site for my kids, and I installed your chat plugin. It’s *exactly* what I was looking for! Thank-you! However, I do have one small problem. Under settings, I cannot “uncheck” the “allow logged in users to choose their chat user names”. If I “uncheck” it and click save, it always comes back checked. As a test, I deactivated all other plugins, but the behavior is still the same. Do you have any ideas? I’m running this wordpress in a virtual machine, so I can take a snapshot and do anything you need me to.

    Thank-you,
    Mike.

    Reply ↓
20. Harris May 4, 2011 at 10:54:54

    Hi,

    Just noticed that between pages the user name changes, e.g. user 123 and once you view a second page, user 321.

    Any way that users will have the same user name throughout their visit, session on my site.

    Thank you again and well done on a great app.

    Reply ↓
21. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 4, 2011 at 14:26:41

    @Harris

    Hi Harris. What are you asking is perfectly logical but since WordPress has PHP sessions turned off i must find some other way of tracking guest users when they browse pages. Expect more on this in the next version. Thanks for your interest 😉

    Reply ↓
22. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 4, 2011 at 14:32:43

    @Mike

    Sorry Mike for not responding, I’ve been really busy. This is a bug from my part it seems. Must investigate and fix it 🙂 Expect more info and maybe new minor version today or tomorrow. Thanks for reporting that.

    Reply ↓
23. Anonymous May 4, 2011 at 14:59:31

    @Marko Martinović
    Hi Marko. I think your response was very quick actually! 🙂 If you need any additional information just let me know.

    Regards,
    Mike.

    Reply ↓
24. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 5, 2011 at 03:24:48

    @Anonymous

    Hi Mike, I’ve just uploaded Quick Chat 1.42 that should take care of this save settings bug. Please report back is everything OK now. Thank you very much for reporting this problem.

    Reply ↓
25. mike May 5, 2011 at 04:20:49

    @Marko Martinović
    Hi Marko, wordpress.org still shows the current version as 1.41. I’ll try again a little later when their pages have refreshed. Thanks again for the really fast update! I’ll report back ASAP.

    Regards,
    Mike.

    Reply ↓
26. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 5, 2011 at 11:26:40

    @mike

    Hi Mike. Something is wrong with WordPress SVN (again) 🙁 I will investigate the cause of that. Until it is resolved you can download latest Quick Chat from http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/quick-chat.zip and install manually. Thanks.

    Reply ↓
27. mike May 5, 2011 at 14:53:15

    @Marko Martinović
    Hi Marko. Perfect! Everything is working great. Thanks a lot for taking care of this so quickly. I gave quick chat a 5 star rating on wordpress.org and marked the 1.41 / 3.1.2 combination as working. I’ll mark 1.42 as working too when it’s up there.

    Regards,
    Mike.

    Reply ↓
28. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 5, 2011 at 15:14:59

    @mike

    No problem my friend and thanks for nice review. I wish WordPress.org infrastructure improves because it takes more energy to fight WordPress.org SVN than fixing bugs and adding new features. 🙂 I’m glad that all is working now (and QC and WP.org) 🙂

    p.s. As for tags I’ve tried to consolidate and remove dummy tags I had to add when WP.org SVN was giving me a hard time.

    Reply ↓
29. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 6, 2011 at 11:32:05

    @A Fan

    Hi “A Fan”. Your comment got stuck in WP spam filter because of the mailnator email thing. Anyways email and even user name is optional on comments here on TechyTalk.info. Problem with saving options is resolved in 1.43 and idea about loading Js is valid proposal and I will include it in the next version (don’t know how I didn’t did that in the first place). Other things you recommended are all good and will find their way into Quick Chat sooner or later. Thanks for your comment.

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30. Ernesto Neumann May 6, 2011 at 21:20:31

    Hi foks,

    first of all thanks for this amazing plugin. unfortunately i always have to refresh my site to se my message. any suggestion to solve this problem?

    thanks guys!

    Reply ↓
31. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 6, 2011 at 22:02:58

    @Ernesto Neumann

    Hi Ernesto. First you should try another browser, anything not older that two years should work fine. After that you can try Quick Chat with wp default theme. If it works we have found the problem. If not, if you can, you go and disable other plugins one by one until you find one that has conflict with QC. When you find “the one”, if you feel kind you report back here so I could try to find a workaround. If it doesn’t work with with all plugins and default theme, then it is your server because there is nothing else that can go wrong. In this case you contact your server admin. Thank you very much for reporting problem and helping me to improve Quick Chat. 🙂

    Reply ↓
32. A Fan May 7, 2011 at 04:51:32

    Marko,

    Thanks for considering all my suggestions and for all of your hard work. I have been doing more testing and have another minor suggestion. Usernames over 10 characters are currently truncated. It would be nice to have a admin setting for the maximum username length.

    Keep up the great work. I will keep testing and trying to provide some good feedback. Thanks again!

    Reply ↓
33. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 7, 2011 at 09:24:03

    @A Fan

    Max user name length will be controllable from admin options in the next 1.45 version (it is almost done so it should be today or tomorrow). Thanks again for your suggestions.

    Reply ↓
34. Conrad May 8, 2011 at 09:16:03

    Hi Marko, I want to restrict access to the chat room to specific users either by adding their user names to a list or as I have the plug in user role editor installed by allowing only users belonging to a specified group to have access to the chat room.

    The reason for this is that our group has a ‘committee’ and we wish to conduct fortnightly on-line committee meetings in private. Is it possible to implement something like this?

    Conrad

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35. Conrad May 8, 2011 at 09:56:28

    Marko it doesn’t matter I have published the chat on a private page and created a user role that only allows specific people access to that page so I have achieved the same effect.

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36. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 8, 2011 at 10:50:25

    @Conrad

    Conrad I’m glad you’ve found the solution. 🙂

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37. Brandi May 8, 2011 at 20:41:21

    Hey Marko, fantastic job! I’m loving the chat plugin – so simple and easy to use. I was just wondering if there was a way to clear the screen from session to session? So that if a new guest signs into the chat, they wouldn’t be able to see everything that was said before?

    Thanks so much for your hard work!

    Reply ↓
38. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 8, 2011 at 21:36:17

    @Brandi

    Hi Brandi. In the current version of Quick Chat this is not possible. But it is worth to reconsider for inclusion into the next version. I am in the process of collecting ideas for the next version so if you have any other ideas please feel free to share with us. Thanks for your comment. 🙂

    Edit: To do what you proposed I would need to make QC into multi session chat so that users can have multiple separated “chat rooms” on the same web site what technically isn’t difficult. But I wouldn’t like to clutter this little chat with big features 🙂

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39. Conrad May 8, 2011 at 23:55:43

    HI Marko is there anyway of seeing who is logged in to the quick chat page that I have created. I guess not actually – only who is logged in to wordpress?

    Reply ↓
40. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 8, 2011 at 23:59:34

    @Conrad

    Hi. You are right. Quick chat uses WP login system for chat user names and security so managing users is WordPress job. Any user counter plugin numbers will apply to the Quick Chat number of chat user. Maybe in a future I could add some ajax counter code but I wouldn’t like to waste our web page bandwidth on refreshing logged in and guests user number. 😉

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41. PunK May 9, 2011 at 05:26:59

    Hey nice plugin ! Thanks & I appreciate the way U managing & updating 🙂

    1 suggest : If u can integrate Facebook login system into chat i.e. automatically pick FB loged in user name into chat system else show login with Facebook ID button then chat will be more useful & no chance of abuse by guest/unknown users ;). You can make option in settings If we can enable Facebook login compulsory or Not (for those who want to use current guest system)

    2 : If we us in sidebar then its ok But when we use Chat on Post/Page the its possible to load chat styles & scripts on that post/page only instead of whole site ?

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42. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 9, 2011 at 06:36:27

    @PunK

    For 1. you can mark checkbox that only logged in users can use chat and install some of the “login with Facebook” WordPress plugins like this one. For 2. that was requested before and I will try to make it into next release. Thanks for your suggestions. 🙂

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43. PunK May 9, 2011 at 09:33:11

    Thanks Marko Its plugin for user registration & profile creations !

    I dnt want user registration on my site which is turn off I want to enable only chat with facebook login (without any registration/profile creation etc). When users visit Chat page with their FB login can use chat feature on site ! any solution ?

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44. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 9, 2011 at 11:59:08

    @PunK

    I know that this is important to you but what you ask isn’t an hour of my underpaid work 🙂 and it requires substantiation modification of QC code. I would have to leave WP supervision on users and implement my own, modify quick chat database in the process and loose “quick” tag out of the “Quick Chat” name. I’m not saying I won’t do it but first I must implement basic things like GUI for moderating and deleting messages by admin users. After that the next logical step is to work on chat login system and Facebook is one of the natural solutions because everyone has Facebook account, except maybe me,my grandma and a weird dude living in the trailer house across my street 🙂 Thanks for your suggestion, be sure that I will take it into an account when the time comes.

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45. PunK May 10, 2011 at 03:24:54

    @Marko Martinović
    Yeah thanks 4 ur time. We L w8 4 the updates 🙂

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46. Ian May 11, 2011 at 13:34:02

    Hi Marko, a quick question about quick chat.
    1.
    I have an issue when reading older chat logs that whenever I scroll up to read past logs, the scroll goes down to the last line periodically. I guess the interval is about 15 seconds. Is it a natural thing? My site’s members are having a hard time reading past logs due to this feature.

    2.
    Do you have a future plan in showing who’s participating in chat?

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47. Markus May 11, 2011 at 14:05:24

    Hi!

    Thanks for the great chat!!!

    Would it be possible to place an timestamp in front of each message? That would be great!

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48. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 11, 2011 at 14:57:31

    @Markus

    Hi Markus! I will try to squeeze that one in one of the next releases 🙂 Thanks for your suggestion.

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49. Marko Martinović AuthorMay 11, 2011 at 14:59:37

    @Ian

    Hi Ian 🙂 For number one this is normal for the current design. For number two yes, that feature is inside my long term plan. Thanks for your comment 😉

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50. mike May 11, 2011 at 17:40:08

    Hi Marko,

    I was wondering if it would be possible to add an admin option that would include a date/timestamp in the chat in various ways.. i.e:

    * Add a date/timestamp to every chat entry (i.e. maybe a shortened date format inserted before / after the username, or possibly at the end of the chat message.
    * Add a date/timestamp every day at a user defined time so that chat users can have a rough idea of what day the “chatting” occurred on.
    * Add a date/timestamp at a user defined time after a “conversation” ends (i.e. if no chatting occurs for 30 minutes, enter a timestamp).

    The reason I ask for this is because the chat is not always heavily used or monitored. A day (or more) could go by, and it would be nice to see when someone asked a question, made a comment, or whatever.

    Maybe this doesn’t make sense in a chat room?? I really don’t know. Let me know what you think!

    Best regards,
    Mike.

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