Erco's Web-Chat Program 'Chatter'

What is 'chatter'?

This is a simple webchat cgi-bin script you can install on your webserver to allow multiple users to login and 'chat' with each other. Tested with IE8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome.

It is a single script to keep installation and maintenance as simple as possible. The script manages a single file, 'chatter.txt' which contains the conversation history.

Multiple users can login with usernames and chat amongst themselves. Only a single conversation is managed; this script does not manage multiple conversations or 'channels'; there is just a single conversation many people can join.

A fixed width font is used throughout so that code pastes and indenting maintains alignment. (It's a design goal to allow programmers to post code to each other) There is a special "Send Code" button which appends code unmolested; indenting is preserved, and chat prompts won't be mixed in.

The reason(s) I wrote this thing and prefer it to most of the chat software out there, including Messenger, iphone Chat, Skype Chat, etc:

• Text is fixed width and preserves preformatted columnar reports like ps(1), ls(1), etc.
  Even ASCII art can be pasted without worry of being screwed up by the chat.
• Leading white space is preserved. (I'm talking to you, facebook/messenger)
• Chat conversation is simple text that is easy to copy/paste into email, etc.
  After a long chat session, it's easy to send someone a copy of the chat session with all text colors preserved
• No dependence on all particpants having a 3rd party "account".
  Anyone can jump on the chat just given an emailed URL and private user/password for .htaccess
  

• Easy to configure and maintain; code is short and a single file, authentication server based,
  no dependence on external software like mysql, jquery/angular, or external perl libraries.
  

Installation

1. Drop the script in your cgi-bin directory and make it executable (chmod +x)
2. Customize these two lines (red text) at the top of the file as needed for your server:

       $G::selfurl  = "http://yourserver.com/cgi-bin/chatter.cgi";    # url to script on your serve
       $G::chatfile = "/some/dir/chatter.txt";                        # unix path to chatfile (file perms must be rw-rw-rw-)

3. Create an empty chatter.txt file, eg.

   echo > /some/dir/chatter.txt && chmod a+rw /some/dir/chatter.txt

That's it. Just visit the URL, login, and type. Connect with multiple browsers for a full converstaion.

How it works

Once you login, the browser is split into two frames; the chat history at the top, and the input field at the bottom.

The chat file's contents (if any) is fetched and displayed in the upper chat window's history. The browser then sets a 3 second javascript timer to poll the file size of this file to see if the size has changed, and if so, updates the changes to the browser.

Whenever someone enters new text and hit's "Send", this posts a form in the lower frame, appending the new text in a single atomic operation to the chatter.txt file. Within a few seconds, all the participant browsers will see the chatter.txt file's size has changed, and update with the new text.

The default polling speed is 3 seconds. This speed can be changed by modifying the refresh_msecs global at the top of the script. Faster polling makes updates quicker, but puts more load on the network and server.

Security

The script has no security of its own; anyone can connect to it, there's no password system.

If you want to password protect the script, use .htaccess/.htpasswd files to manage access via your webserver.

Maintenance

The chatter.txt file keeps track of the running conversation.

Since it never zeroes itself out, old conversations remain.

If you want to clear the chat, can do it by using the "Archive" button
(available only to the moderator's username -- see $G::moderator in the script)
or by emptying the file using, e.g.

        echo > /some/dir/chatter.txt
    

Download

You can download the tar file here: http://seriss.com/people/erco/unixtools/chatter/chatter-1.20.tar.gz
The script's web page URL is: http://seriss.com/people/erco/unixtools/chatter/

License

This is GPL licensed software. See the COPYING file included with the tar file for the license.

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