Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Chat module 3.2.5, defining cache size, javascript version

It's pretty simple...  I hacked an irc server to allow longer user names (nicks) and not require a successful RDNS lookup (my work's firewall screws those up; other people are probably in the same situation) and hacked my client applet for the same.  Then, because my home dsl connection that my server is based on is kinda sucky, I added auto-reconnect to the client.

For those who haven't been to the site -- I wanted a chat window taking up the bottom 10th of the screen so players can talk with each other without needing a separate window.  I tried setting this up w/o javascript by having user-new-2.tcl, user-login-2.tcl, and the cookie handler in index.tcl source the frameset page depending on the http-referer, but it would sometimes get confused and the user would end up with 2 chat frames.  So now the main page has javascript to redirect to the frameset page as needed and that seems to work better.

Since this is IRC you don't get any IM capability like you do with jabber, nor is there any authentication.  No logging, either, although this would be trivial to add either directly to the server or as a special client.  But IMO it's a vast improvement over the historical ACS "chat."

I've put my code at http://www.carnageblender.com/public/irc/ for those who are interested.