fpgroups.com: A raw chat room is now available

[Fairlight]

In the relative spacial/temporal region of
Thu, Sep 06, 2007 at 07:32:36PM -0700, fp at casabellagallery.com achieved the spontaneous
generation of the following:
> 
> I have put up a simple but functional (as far as I can test it so far) chat
> room.  It is open and unrestricted.  Check it out and let me know if you
> guys find it to serve the purpose of allowing two or more members to chat,
> speed, looks ... 

My initial reaction:  Ugh.

Pretty much everything about that interface goes against the grain of
conventional realtime chat programs.  Entry box on top, enter does not send
and no option to make it do so, entry -above- the conversation.  Oh, and
when you click on Send or hit Tab-Enter to hit it with the keyboard, it
doesn't refocus you in the entry box.  That is cumbersome as hell.

Then there's the conversation itself.  Below the entry area, and in
-reverse- chronological order.  You need the reverse order because the page
is so long you'd have to scroll to the bottom to see what was said, which
would be a pain.

As it is, though, this system is entirely lacking (from what I can see) in
private message functionality.  This, combined with apparently the
persistent nature of the conversation as stored and presented on my screen
from when I wasn't even on, results in a lack of privacy that's practically
alarming.  I've been doing realtime chat since ForumNet/ICB and the
earliest days of IRC.  Private messages exist for a reason.

Also, there's someone named Orlando on, and I had no idea they were on, I'd
just done a test message and started this email.  I went to flip back to
Firefox to check something about the page and saw a reply.  Which brings us
to the lack of a "/who" type listing in a column somewhere that makes it
extremely useless because you can't even tell who's there unless they're
actively talking--again, going back to the lack of privacy.  If you were
talking about something and then someone comes in, they can just lurk there
totally unannounced and you can't even watch what you say.  Not that I'm in
the habit of talking behind people's backs, but this total lack of
awareness is simply unacceptable in a chat system.

There's also a little higher latency than I'd expect, probably due to the
polling nature of the interface.  That, or it's NPH-based with a higher
wait time on push than I'd expect.

There's also really bad (and probably poorly done, if the display is any
indication) escaping of single quotes, which is illustrated in the output
of "that\'s" for instance, in the chat.  If it's not bothering to unquote
it for redisplay, it makes me wonder what's going on behind the scenes and
just how the security is or isn't for SQL injection.  That's like poor
man's injection protection right there, and done half-arsedly at that.  You
can read up on SQL injection online and find out why just escaping ' is not
the sole solution.  It's still possible to break, especially with
permutations of combinations of special characters.

The chat area also eats messages over a predefined length, yet has no JS in
place to prevent you exceeding your "packet segment length", which is like
Chat User Interface Programming 101.

There are any number of packages that do IRC-style (or even -good- IM
style) chat.  It's unfortunate that you haven't implemented one of them.

If you're actually writing this and need to debug it, FireBug pointed one
of these out to me:

[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111
(NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.status]" nsresult: "0x80040111
(NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)" location: "JS frame :: http://www.fpgroups.com/chatroom/chatRoomServer.js :: anonymous :: line 60" data: no]
[Break on this error] if (xo.status == 200) {

> As far as smilies and commands are two things I need to work on.  For now,
> I am not requiring logins or valid user IDs.  A name and the time to chat
> is all that's required.

Forget smileys entirely.  Useless and distracting.

Commands...unless /msg (/m) and /who (/w) are two of them, I'm not seeing a
point.  

The basics aren't even covered in terms of the persistent user interface.
I wouldn't go thinking about esoteric expansions.

> You input will be appreciated!

I dunno how much you'll appreciate this, but it's all honestly true, IMNSHO.

I'd highly suggest looking into something more functional.  I can -not- see
using that for more than about 5 minutes, in an emergency, if it was the
absolute last option available to reach someone--and then only to ask them
to call me.  Frankly, that's what email is for.

 I'm sorry, but I've been doing realtime chat since 1989 and it is a
horrible thing to have to tell someone that I'd rather use AOL's IM than
their chat software because AIM is more robust.  It is, however, true in
this case.

Absolutely nothing personal about it, Jose.  You're trying
to do a good thing here, but that software is so wholly
underpowered/underfeatured/buggy, it's not even funny.  I'd look into using
an IRC-based solution with a Java front end--or even CGI-IRC (perl-based
with NPH).  You could host the channel on FreeNode.  I say this because
the features are already there, there isn't a security/privacy issue,
etc...basically every issue I've put forth should already be addressed, and
you can be up and running in under an hour.  It would possibly take a day
or few to knock this current incarnation into usable shape.

mark->
-- 
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