The Default Shoutbox

[Kyttias]

This is a question aimed directly at HoF: What features for the Shoutbox are planned for the next release?

But I'd like to hear from the rest of you as well - If you're not HoF, what features would you want? Do you currently use the shoutbox?

I've gutted the CKEditor out of mine in favor of a textbox, my own WYSIWYG mix of buttons, and some custom backend security. It's now much prettier looking, but as I'm staring at it, I've come to have a few questions:

• How do we even moderate it? Directly from mySQL & phpMyAdmin? That means only I can do that - and that will never work on a real site. I'll have to make moderation tools myself so my team can handle spamming/inappropriate users in a timely manner.
  
• Do old messages ever get removed to save space? And I don't mean visually, as I assume only so many messages get displayed - I mean from the database itself? That's going to take up a lot of room really fast.

At a minimum, I need to implement these two things before I can even use the Shoutbox on a live site.

Other things I'd like to see:

• A more sleek interface at a base. CKEditor really is overkill for this, especially since the character limit is 2500.
  
• Speaking of, a visual character limit would be nice on all textarea input fields across the site - or at least include basic html markup, there's a "maxlength" attribute on textareas and using it will at least show the user they can't type anymore when they've hit the limit. Anything past the limit is lost to the nether and this sort of communication with a user is vital.
  
• I'd love to see user avatars next to posts that link to their profiles!
  

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At this point, I'm considering looking into webhooks for Discord and ditching the default Shoutbox entirely. It forces users to get a Discord account if they don't have one, but it's not like they can't use the forum to communicate as an alternative, anyway.

If anyone has any other third party shoutboxes they recommend, I'm willing to take a gander.

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Unrelated: How is life, HoF? It's been a busy year for me. My gf just got her Bachelor's in Computer Science and we'll be taking a road trip back to Washington State next month. No job lined up yet, but the college life can finally be behind us.