I know the developer is very specific about the fact that no support is provided; however, the Readme is sorely lacking in details, and I haven't yet been able to put it to any use.

We would very much appreciate it if the developer could put together a short howto, maybe only explaining how he set the demo up.

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.

Got an account just to write this, and to help offset the bad rating given by some ignorant [l]user who didn't bother to make it work like the author suggested (btw, is there a way to delete an unfair review/rating here?)

The gallery is hands-down beautiful, and simple. There is a beauty to simplicity!

Just check out the "demo" link and judge for yourself.