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!
  

-

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.

-

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.

[Hall of Famer]

Well my original idea was to use a simplified version of new CKEditor. Since CKEditor 4, it is offering 3 different package: Basic, Standard, and Full. I am considering different CKEditor packages for different textboxes. The Shoutbox will use bare minimum so it will use the Basic package. Private/Visitor Messages will use Standard package, while admin created documents/pages should use full package. You can take a look at the difference of the 3 packages of CK Editor 4 from this page:
http://ckeditor.com/download

Of course, I am open to suggestions from you and other users. Discord sounds like a neat idea, it will require users to sign up there though. Perhaps a customizable shoutbox interface will be implemented, so you can choose among CKEditor, Discord or plain Text Area as you wish. I promised that Mys v1.4.0 would have a powerful admin control panel, so it is reasonable that admins can configure their sites to their likes in a much more convenient way than before.

Well life is hard for me as usual, but the hardest part is over since I have a job now. I actually have some time to work on the script, after a few more months I will have more free time. Before releasing version 1.4.0 though, I plan to fix some things in version 1.3.4 and maybe release a stable/secure version for Mys v1.3.x if demand is high. It has been quite some time since I released v1.3.4, it would help users with the transition from v1.3.x to v1.4.x.

[aquapyrofan]

Ok, why isn't input in the shout box properly scrubbed of things like flash? Oversized text? Etc. I had a user test it and, needless to say, I'm going to be fixing that problem.

[Hall of Famer]

Well the shoutbox uses an old version of CKEditor 3 which is kinda obsolete in today's standards. I will fix this of course in future releases.

[KatFennec]

Originally Posted by Hall of Famer

Well the shoutbox uses an old version of CKEditor 3 which is kinda obsolete in today's standards. I will fix this of course in future releases.

Can you please make sure to scrub flash embedding and javascript at the least? Those alone would make the shoutbox significantly less dangerous. Personally, I'd want to just exclude HTML from it entirely if you can, but I understand if that's not possible. Maybe replace it with BBcode?

[Silver_Brick]

Kat we can trim the harmful html from the text box and we can use html purifier also so we can use bold italic underline html tags ^^ and hof i really want moderation tool as kyttias said