I received over 200 Php injection attacks blocked by Jdefender when this component was installed. I used this component on 2 sites and both received daily over 30 attacks. now all it's fine because i removed the chat. Was not about flood; was about Php injection scripts. Don't use components like this without security apps !

Easy to install. Look nice. But no backend. Noticed a problem, it never ends read, always downloading something. And conflicts with ShoutBox.

nice on screenshotss sand review but canīt use it.
after i installed it blocked my firewall my whole page during "spybot detect" and after that my firefox browser crashed.
donīt know y but seam to connect to an untrustworthy ad ervice
adxanet.net

Great platform, does what it says on the tin.

The lack of backend admin is annoying. Like a previous review stated, having a "flirt" room doesn't fit well with my kayak website - the point of it being embarassing! Wont run it on my website purely for that reason.
Room 1,2,3,4,5 will do fine, mr.developer! (or better still, some backend admin)

The good:

Installed like a champ

Linked and started up no problems

Lots of smileys

Fast, very fast. No lag in between messages.


Things to improve for next update:

Admin page

Previous chat conversations can not be cleared. This is really bad if someone posts something you don't want others to see. Like an innapropriate link etc.

Ability to load the chatroom in its own window instead of in the parent window. (You can create a new mod and make it open in a new window but it loads the entire site instead of just the chat.)

Option to not allow users to change their nickname. (The demo on the site is currently this way and would like to know how to set that up myself)


Other than that, it runs smooth. I will wait and see what it does to my bandwidth usage at the end of the month and I'll update this review.

Installed it and tested with members on site... Good, but not perfect...

1. No any admin tool
2. Causes a big lag...

your chat room is work..

The good:
The chat is "Fast", no lag after you type your message.
It looks good
It's easy to install

The bad:
No admin features!
It would be nice if we could choose which rooms to be displayed. Having a "flirt" room doesn't fit well with my hunting website.

Yes, this component can work. But I can't find some configuration options at the backend since there is NO admin page for this component.

Since this component in fact used phpfreechat as the core, so users have to hack the files of phpfreechat via FTP to customise the chatting room layout.

Hope the author will add some or all configuration of phpfreechat options to the backend, especially allow us to edit the CSS easily.

Another suggestion: add an option of "Only registered users can enter chat room", then we can set the menu to public but when they clicked, there will be a message telling them to login or register.

Not sure what happened but this this new version does not seem to work on my platform. Also seems heavy -- the last version was fast, light and no problems. :-(

No documentation, no support forum. Could be that the componet works, when English is used as language. But the configuration for another language is a pain (trial and error, reading the documentation of the original script php Free Chat).

This a is basically a little script that installs PHPFreeChat on your server, and displays the container in an iFrame. PHPFreeChat is very good, but this component is still work in progress: the lack of admin panel and documentation is painful, and the iFrame workaround is not what I'd prefer. But it's named 0.2, so I consider it's a good start.

All the questions asked and limitations mentioned by prior posters are answered on the PhpFreeChat website: in fact it's highly configurable. Just consider you're running PhpFreeChat as-is, and use the commands and param's (if you figure out how to link administrative rights to your nickname)

One word on the iFrame workaround: this is a potential security issue IMO: one can pick up the URL from the HTML source, and open the chat from outside Joomla thus bypassing the login procedure. Meaning someone you banned from your site can still cause havoc in your chatrooms if he has an evil mind. Especially if your admin account is called "admin" ;)

like the extra rooms and great styling. Now works with CB too! MUCH better. Picks up chat area name from site name and nick name from user name!

If you need some kind of chat/IM feature in your site, in my opinion FreeCHAT is the best option at the moment. It's not perfect, the UI could use a little polishing, but it works very well, no problems installing or using it.

It could use a configuration backend, so you could turn off displaying of user login/logout activities, for example. Other than that, I find it very useful. I previewed almost all of the other chat components/addons for Joomla in this site, and in my opinion this is the best of the lot. However, there is still room for improvement (not a bad thing per se!)

A quick tip for removing/changing the "extra" chatrooms: you can edit the chatwindow.php file in the component's dir so you can choose which rooms to display; this is easily done using, for example, JoomlaXplorer (a must-have extension anyway!) Look for the "channels" array. This way, the other chatrooms won't be displayed anymore. If they still are, it's because you've already logged on once with the "full" list; this is easily remedied by clicking on the "X" icon next to the chatroom title to close it.

the chat feature is good, but it records your message(s) and there is no way to delete it. once u leave and come back in the room, the old conversations are still there.. not good!