Different Chat Perhaps?

Tell us how we can improve the night ops forum. Your suggestions and complaints are welcome.
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n1ghtshade
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Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by n1ghtshade » Thu Jul 11, 2013 2:36 am

As of the past few months i have been experiencing a lot of trouble with lag and disconnecting and such. I would think that if you switched to a irc based chat it would decrease the issues, as well as making it a lot easier to chat as you would be able to use a client and such. You could also embed mibbit or some other web based irc client on this site, making it just as quick to use as the current chat option.

Just a suggestion.

vonunov
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by vonunov » Thu Jul 11, 2013 2:37 am

Yeah, I would definitely show up more often if it were an IRC channel. I'd recommend qwebirc for the web interface if mibbit doesn't sit right with you for whatever reason.
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Secant
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Secant » Fri Jul 12, 2013 2:25 am

In the future, we'll be switching to AJAX chat (http://frug.github.io/AJAX-Chat/), which is 1000 times more capable than pfc. Unfortunately, I don't have access to an IRC server, otherwise that with a web frontend would be ideal.

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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Xanatos » Sun Jul 14, 2013 8:20 am

Guess we'll have to make do with our digital smoke signals for now.
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by noone » Sun Aug 04, 2013 5:35 am

I'm pretty sure You can use espernet's chat for that: http://www.esper.net/publicirc.php :)
Just click menu -> add to website

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Lynx
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Lynx » Thu Mar 06, 2014 1:53 pm

Sorry for necro, but what about torchat?
It's nice and quick, and very secure and pretty and nice and shiny.
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Secant
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Secant » Fri Mar 07, 2014 2:16 am

Torchat is definitely an option. But, I don't see any web clients for it. Is there a way to embed it in a web page?

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Lynx
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Lynx » Fri Mar 07, 2014 8:45 am

Secant wrote:Torchat is definitely an option. But, I don't see any web clients for it. Is there a way to embed it in a web page?
I'm sure there is some way to do it. I'll check.
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by vonunov » Wed Dec 03, 2014 11:44 pm

I don't know if this thing is on a VPS yet, but I could host an IRC server if not, and if Torchat doesn't work out.
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Secant » Thu Dec 04, 2014 2:04 am

Having an IRC server isn't the issue, unfortunately - we tried out several different chat programs and there was no general agreement about which was best. IMHO irc is what we should be using.

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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Absent » Sat Dec 06, 2014 1:57 am

Personally I'm always on IRC, and it's easy to set up little script for a client that just automatically starts and connects to various channels and networks, as opposed to having to go to a specific link and check a browser tab and keep that open. Some people will prefer not to have to download anything, though, and I think there's some decent web based embeddable IRC solutions. Kiwi comes to mind, you basically just have to copy-paste the script you can get from: https://kiwiirc.com/embedding


It seems pretty good idk. It's open source and stuff. Hopefully if you guys do this it'd enable people to stay connected more often.

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Xanatos
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Xanatos » Sat Dec 06, 2014 8:36 am

Jabber is becoming increasingly popular with our older members (okay, only about 4-5 of us, but it's a start). It offers a decent level of security but can be a little daunting to set up for new members. And of course it doesn't have the convenience of being able to be accessed from any computer. If there was some way to integrate it into the site, that'd be the perfect solution.
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Secant » Sat Dec 06, 2014 9:38 pm

I was looking around for some jabber web clients and it looks like there are some decent ones. Converse.js (https://conversejs.org/) would probably work best. However, it looks like OTR is not supported in Jabber group chat. For that reason Jabber is probably not suitable to replace NONET chat, although it's been great for chatting person to person. OTR is very strong, I personally plan to keep using it no matter what happens to NONET chat.

IRC with TLS encryption is not as strong as OTR, but it's capable of encrypted group chat. This along with the fact that IRC is generally well known and has good web clients available for it makes it the best option IMHO. A while back we tried several web clients and Kiwi IRC was the best of them, although not everyone was satisfied with it.

If there's renewed interest in having a NONET IRC, I can set it up again. Perhaps Kiwi has improved since we last tried it.

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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Xanatos » Sun Dec 07, 2014 12:42 am

If there's a way to tailor it to NOnet, integrate it and keep the things we already like about the Chat, I'd be open for a second shot.
We are all books containing thousands of pages and within each lies an irreparable truth.
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Secant » Sun Dec 07, 2014 4:38 am

What did you have in mind for tailoring, and what features specifically are you interested in? Get me on jabber if you want to talk at length.

One thing IRC can't do is use phpBB for authentication like AJAX chat does. Jabber (and, in fact, most "normal" chat services) can't do that either though.

There does seem to be some interest, so I'll go ahead and set something up. More in a few days.

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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Xanatos » Sun Dec 07, 2014 12:18 pm

Having the dark aesthetic of the forum (makes it easier on the eyes, especially when switching tabs) and linking our Chat personality to our accounts when we log in to prevent any cases of mistaken identity. I recall on our old Chat there was some joker pretending to be me on more than one occasion. Caused quite a bit of confusion.
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Secant » Sun Dec 07, 2014 4:51 pm

The dark theme should be doable in Kiwi without too much trouble. For chat accounts, you'd have to register your nick, and then nobody else would be able to use it.

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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Secant » Thu Dec 11, 2014 2:34 am

OK, give this a try.

For IRC clients:
chat.nightops.net:6667 #the_lounge (unencrypted)
chat.nightops.net:6697 #the_lounge (SSL)

Web chat (kiwi IRC):
https://chat.nightops.net:7777/ (SSL)

I don't have a valid SSL certificate for chat.nightops.net, so you'll have to configure your IRC client to accept invalid certificates, or tell your browser to ignore the untrusted cert if you're using Kiwi.

If you want to register your nick in IRC, use:

Code: Select all

/msg NickServ register <password> <email>
Kiwi still needs a "dark" theme that matches the site, but other than that it's functional. Please post here if you have issues.

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Xanatos
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Xanatos » Fri Dec 12, 2014 2:52 am

Well, this has my vote. Most of the issues during my first encounter with Kiwi IRC have been remedied.
We are all books containing thousands of pages and within each lies an irreparable truth.
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Absent » Thu Jan 01, 2015 1:20 am

K I have my thing set up to autojoin so I'll probably be in there most of the time.

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Xanatos
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Xanatos » Thu Jan 01, 2015 9:33 am

Ace, I'll start dropping in more often. The Kiwi chat seems to be working so far except I'm not always getting sound notifications. Only when my name is mentioned.
We are all books containing thousands of pages and within each lies an irreparable truth.
What is locked, can be opened. What is hidden, can be found. What is yours... can be mine.

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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Absent » Sun Feb 08, 2015 3:58 am

http://wiki.mibbit.com/index.php/PhpBB_integration


With mibbit, you can integrate IRC with phpbb3 and it'll use forum names as nick names. That might be something to play with if you have some spare time. I'm not sure if that's authentication or just pulling in the name from the page though... You'd probably still want to register the nick. I think Kiwii is fine, though, tbh. In kiwi's embeddable code, there appears to be an option to append some default nick information. Like:

Code: Select all

?nick=aNick
I'm curious as to weather I could set up a regex within the site code to grab the users nickname and stick it in a variable, then put something like this:

Code: Select all

?nick=$forumname
Course, that still wouldn't *ensure* the user is accurate. For that you'd have to work with irc users, which is easy enough. I don't know how the mibbit forum integration works, though. Not sure if that's authentication or if it's just doing something similar to what I'm saying about kiwi...

Nobody seems to be using the beta irc, though. It's basically just me and vonunov in there all the time. People still use the AJAX chat from time to time. I think. I'm only in there every once in a while. It would be really cool if I could find a way to pass the conversation from AJAX into IRC lol. That'd probably be complicated though meh.

I would really recommend folks use IRC clients though. It's way easier after you get it all set up, and it'll facilitate way more activity in the chat. I also have mine setup on my other channels so it automatically logs me in. Basically, as long as my laptop is on and I have an internet connection, I'm in multiple irc channels. This is what we do at some forums I run elsewhere, and as a result there's almost always at least a few people in the chat.

I personally use hexchat on linux, but it works perfectly well on windows:

https://hexchat.github.io/

It's almost definitely the best way to go... If anyone needs help I can probably help get you set up.

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Xanatos
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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Xanatos » Sun Feb 08, 2015 10:54 am

The mibbit integration may be a better solution, we'll have to see how it compares to Kiwi though.

I typically use the AJAX chat simply because most other members use it more often. However, I'm liking Kiwi so far and would be happy to replace AJAX with it.

A tutorial on how to set up hexchat would be appreciated.
We are all books containing thousands of pages and within each lies an irreparable truth.
What is locked, can be opened. What is hidden, can be found. What is yours... can be mine.

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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Absent » Thu Feb 12, 2015 1:59 am

I'll write up a tutorial over the weekend for both linux and windows. I think there's only two ways to get user auth from the forums to the IRC. One would be to copy the user database from phpbb3 and automatically generate IRC users with the database crypted passwords as the pw for each user. Then whenever a user is logged in, and goes to the web irc client, it would check against the cookie that checks for phpbb auth, and if the user is logged in, send a query using the users pw and user to login to the irc server. That would be doable but it would take some time to develop. And it would be sort of hard to get right security wise. I don't think there's anything out there right now that does it, not sure. This site doesn't really use ssl either, so the (probably weakly encrypted pw) would get sent to the IRC server in plaintext (and md5 probably). Which is minimal security. Probably not what we would want. Could probably hash it more which would be ok security though. Meh. Seems like a lot of work.

Two would be, and I think this would be relatively easy, to check for a logged in user and join with that username, then configure the IRC server to change a users nick to something random (if the irc server supports that) after 1 - 5 minutes if the user doesn't verify their identity. I think most irc servers have an option for disallowing joining from already registered nicks if they don't log in and stuff like that.


With an actual client like hexchat however, basically you just drop in your username and the password you wanna use in settings, and it'll automatically log you in.

I have seen an AJAX IRC client, though. I don't know how that works, I'll look into it more when I get some time.

Edit:

According to vonunov, some torrent sites use some other method of auth. I'll have to look into that.

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Re: Different Chat Perhaps?

Post by Secant » Sat Feb 14, 2015 9:26 pm

So here's the thing - it would be super slick to have nickserv use phpBB's database as an authenticator. But there's no clear "good" way to do it. Every option is messy and would be hard to maintain, not to mention that all options would depend on us moving off our current webhost to a VPS since access to the current DB is limited. So, maybe we can table that feature for now, and come back to it after the move.

Apparently it can be made to work if you're willing to make phpBB less secure: http://forum.anope.org/index.php?topic=2265.0

Doesn't mibbit work by passing connections through some kind of webservice maintained by mibbit? I think I remember excluding mibbit from consideration for that reason. Looks like, with that modification, it can use phpBB as an authenticator though.

For the relatively few users we have, standard NickServ should do well enough. At least in that case people have the option to register their nicks, a feature which AJAX chat only pretends to have.

Automatically setting a nick in kiwi is intriguing though. It looks like phpBB doesn't include the username in the session cookie, so I'm not sure how it could be made to work when navigating to the chat from parts of the site which don't load the forum code. But, for pages which load phpBB, I think it would be possible to tack on the username to the chat link, assuming that information is made available to the theme.

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