I also can't get into the chat room, I've perused many of the other threads on this topic and haven't come across one that seems to fix my problem.

I'm using MSIE on three different machines - two Win2000 boxes and an NT4 box. Everytime I try to enter the Chat Room I get a dialogue box that says, "You must first login to the forum to chat. Click your browser back button and login/register".

I've enable cookies in my profile.

Any other suggestions?

TIA

hi Bill,

Make sure you've set the option "Automatically login when you return to the site?" to yes.

That should do the trick.

Do

That did the trick. I'm not sure I'm fond have having to set my profile to login automatically, but I guess I can live with it.

Thanks.

I notice that getting into the Chat Room is a common issue - I ddn't see anything in the FAQ on it. Perhaps we should put together a FAQ entry or a sticky for here that presents the requirements and solutions to common problems associated with the Chat Room.

Again, thanks a lot!

hi Bill,

Glad that it worked. If folks aren't comfortable to have the automatic login for each forum visit, you could just change the option temporarily for the sessions where you'd like to use the chat room, then set it back before logging off.

The chat room isn't a part of vBulletin, that's why it's not covered in the FAQ's. It's a free tool that Wa'il has linked to the forum as a service for members who've requested a place to chat with forum friends. It's not perfect, and not everyone can access it .. in particular it's not AOL or Netscape friendly.

Karen has put together a great "Hot Links" post as a Sticky here in the Comments Box .. with links to the most frequently asked technical questions and concerns about using the forums and tools. We can add a link to thread(s) about using the chat room, that would be a good idea

Doreen

Yeah, I thought about changing it back, but I know myself well enough to know that I would usually forget. So I need to be comfortable with that possibility - and I guess I am.

I think Karen's links is the best place for it - there quite a bit of good info there.

I would be willing to write you a new chat room in Java or perhaps perl that should work for all folks. However I do not know enough about how vbulletin works to get the integration that you would probably be looking for.... ie, without knowing more, things like automatic login and such would not work...

Let me know if you want me to give it a whack...

Mark

Thanks Mark,

Java chats can be server and bandwidth intensive, so perl or php scripts are ideal, using a "server push" technique, instead of refresh as most java scripts do.

Developing a script from scratch maybe an overkill, since there are quite a few open source chat scripts available. At the time when we installed it, phpMyChat was the best around.

We can revisit the available ones and see if anythign sounds good:

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scrip...s/Chat_Scripts/
http://www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scri...s/Chat_Scripts/

Integration should not a big deal, I'd take care of it.

Wa'il