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I'm shopping around for software for a forum. The client is a NFP and one of their requirements is chat. Is there a multi user chat feature that can be (easily) installed with xenForo?

Thanks
 
hmmmm,

Thanks Jack, but I don't think they'd be real pleased with the look and feel of the "shout box". They are a small spiritual community that has been on Yuku (since the ezboard days) for close to ten years and they had java based chat til recently when it was changed to flash chat from 123. The reason for leaving Yuku is the service goes down regularly since they moved to Amazon servers and the chat is a mess. They really just want a reliable board and chat (They use the chat feature daily).
 
I recommend cometchat over arrow chat, tbh.

I'm awaiting some new features for Xenforo before i make the jump and license and when i do it, cometchat will be my chat of choice :)
Could you expand on why you prefer CometChat? I'm trying to decide between it and ArrowChat, and would appreciate any additional input you can provide.
 
I've used both CometChat and Arrow Chat.

A couple of years ago, CometChat was kind of a pile of crap in the way it was coded (Slow, broke a lot, system resources were crazy, etc).

Because of that, I purchased ArrowChat, which ran pretty nicely and overall is a decent piece of software.

When I started my xF site (my old vB one is still running and uses the ArrowChat installation), I wanted a chat for that site as well and as I had the old CometChat license, I figured I'd use that to save a few bucks and try it again.

Good thing I did, it has since been rewritten and runs very nicely on my xF site (integration is simple). While I haven't tried the very latest ArrowChat, I've very satisfied with CometChat and don't have any plans to replace it.

Support on both chats is a little weak, but realistically, you don't need much support anyway.
 
Could you expand on why you prefer CometChat? I'm trying to decide between it and ArrowChat, and would appreciate any additional input you can provide.

I tried Arrowchat and while the look and features are lovely, it just was a bit buggy for me and I use cometchat and it was an overall better experience and i haven't had too many issues with it. Setup was easy with CC vs AC(not that it was difficult, just took a few more steps
 
Thanks for the feedback, guys. I presume you were using the previous versions of ArrowChat? I see they've just launched 1.5 which brings a bunch of new features along with it.
 
Looks like that was released about 4 months ago now, so nope, I haven't looked at it. I did try and login though but my username/pass won't work and I also can't retrieve it, so... yeah. Anyway, it SOUNDS good from what the update notes say. heh

Good luck to ya though, I know CC is good now and with a full rewrite, AC should be pretty good now too. =)
 
If there is one chat software I would prefer, it's CometChat. I've been a CometChat customer for over a year now, and have no reason to switch to anything else. They provide everything you could need in a chat software, although I'm not sure EXACTLY what you are looking for, so I can't speak for you. I would go ahead and check it out:

http://cometchat.com
 
We're using CometChat for an upcoming project, which works just fine. The lack of proper integration also bothered me a bit so I added some javascript on top of CometChat which rearranges the DOM to integrate it with XenForo.

I won't share the code for this as it's made for my company and I'm not sure if the CometChat license would even allow me to, it's just to give you an idea of what's possible with a little fiddling. The basic version of this only took me about a day from start to finish.

Screen shot 2012-04-13 at 4.36.11 PM.webp
 
We're using CometChat for an upcoming project, which works just fine. The lack of proper integration also bothered me a bit so I added some javascript on top of CometChat which rearranges the DOM to integrate it with XenForo.

I won't share the code for this as it's made for my company and I'm not sure if the CometChat license would even allow me to, it's just to give you an idea of what's possible with a little fiddling. The basic version of this only took me about a day from start to finish.

View attachment 28280

Which version of CometChat were/are you using?
 
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