Seeing how topics derail and "chats" are done in the comments of several pictures, I think we really need some kind of chatbox/shoutbox here.

I know we are all over the world and therefore not everyone is online at the same time, but having a chat would nevertheless help communication here.

Y'know what would be epic is if we had something like a chan board added to the site. Can you imagine it? HypnoHub and Hypno-chan side by side, just a single click away from each other. Boy, that's the dream.

We've talked about it a bit in the Declassified thread, though not enough to come to a decision. Some information was passed around about how to set one up. I'm at least moderately interested in trying it. If we get a chat up and running, though, we'll need to appoint people to monitor it, because I'm pretty sure Vanndril and I both agreed that we don't want the extra work. :P

To be fair, I feel that a lot of the derailing that happens in the threads and comments wouldn't happen without the subjects at hand.

In any case, I'm all for a chat! I wanted it since it was brought up a week and change ago. I've just been way too busy irl to do much of anything here. I've only gotten online to chat with Mindwipe twice in two weeks. XD

I'll do a little looking into it and, once things calm down on my end, see what can be done.

In the meantime, anyone know of any good chat scripts we could use? I'd prefer it be on the hub rather than off-site, so none of the chat room sites and whatnot.

The problem is, IRC servers aren't ever coded in PHP because it would be horrible. The reason is that, even if PHP consumes <<moe.slayerduck.com/|"little memory">>, every user connecting to the site spawns a new instance, so information cannot be shared between one instance and another, without database access. And since an IRC would involve constant polling by several users, this would mean lots of memory.

For example, here on the booru, every page hit has to do a lot of work from the ground up. It is possible to avoid this, for example, on my hover zoom script I made a code path which uses <<php.net/manual/en/book.apc.php|Alternative PHP Cache>>, <<hypnohub.net/hypnohub-hover-zoom.php?apc|and now I know it's installed here>> (even though I didn't test it and just read that manual, so I'm glad it worked and didn't cause a server error, lol), but not many scripts make use of such things.

On Node.js, ASP.NET and I believe Ruby on Rails and Python, scripts can have shared global state, so they consume "more memory", but it doesn't increase too much when having lots of users.

Still, even if IRC on top of PHP is out of the table (I think), there are other options, like <<www.phpfreechat.net/demo|this one>>.