BlastChat 
- Includes visible advertising for developer. Free limited to 10 concurrent chats.
Completely authenticated chat entry, chat can be loaded only and only on your website.
BlastChat is the best chat hosting service designed for website communities from the smallest personal websites to the huge megasites who desire to provide their members and visitors with a superb chat experience.
Implemented as a Web 2.0 application and hosted on our servers, BlastChat delivers fast and reliable chat solution to your website without heavy load on your server, without worries about bandwidth and with no system level administration needs on your end.
You do not have to be a computer programmer or system administrator to implement professional chat. BlastChat installs in minutes, requires no coding on your part and your chat rooms can be up and running TODAY!
BlastChat is the perfect solution for general community chatting, online moderated interviews or teaching sessions, customer support or any other use you might need, whether you need to communicate with a single person or hundreds.
More about BlastChat features can be found at our homepage.
If you are thinking of installing a chat application on your own server, here are some possible drawbacks you may want to consider:
1. If your website is on a shared server, chances are that it will have difficulty handling chat traffic due to the heavy load incurred by chat which the limited hardware resources are incapable of providing. Most shared webhosting companies prohibit chat applications.
2. If your website is on a dedicated server but has limited memory and/or is not properly configured, generally these might have difficulty handling the traffic and load caused by chat applications, or could be completely crashed when out of resources.
3. If your chat application code and database queries are not properly and completely
optimized, chat can require 5-10 times more server resources then necessary.
4. If your server internet connection is not capable of the required speeds for chat,
or is behind have too many hubs, then all chat responses will be slow, resulting in a very poor chat experience for your users, most of which will be dissatisfied and may not return.
5. Problems might propagate with as little as 10 chatters, depending on your server’s
hardware and software configuration, current server load, refresh rate and other
variables, again resulting in a very poor chat experience.
Chat is persistant. Meaning that everything said seems to hang around for a long time so when folks log in, they can read everything that was said prior to them entering the room. I could not see a way to clear the chat.
Must click on the send button to send a message. Small issue but still annoying.
The rotating banner on the home page. I dont want a banner there. No way I can see to get rid of it.
Was goofing around and tried to log in as Steve but then found out that, "steve - this global username is already in use" So I guess my users better have a unique name then.
Chat is not persistant, you can set room configuration to not display old messages to chatters who enter room.
Absolutely no need to click on "send" button to submit messages, simply hit enter.
There will be option for customers to disable banners (it is working progress under testing)
Your site member's usernames are UNIQUE (only guests are checked against global usernames).
Some features I'd like to see:
-Option to hide global chatters.
-Customizable log options (whether or not to keep one)
-Even minimal ability to visually customize the chat window.
-Option to disallow unregistered guests.
This thing is free, functional, and they have better support for their product than other extentions (like Community Builder). At this point, though, it's not customizable or even a little professional looking. It's probably only useful for personal sites.
And lastly, they ask for a link from your site to theirs. Don't forget to put yours up! It's a simple thing to ask for a good product.
You can disable global features completely.
No log so far, as it takes a lot of space (you can make show room's last 25 messages to incoming chatters tho)
You can use your own CSS to customize look.
You can disable guest access from very beginning of BlastChat release.
We do not ask for a link to our site, but for public link to component on your site (as you can still disable guest access to your rooms and/or disable global features as well)
You can disable global features completely and you can disable access for guests as well.
One can not compare IRC based chat with AJAX based (read more about how AJAX works to understand why there is "delay"), lag can be caused by user having slow internet connection as well.
As this would then be used by many gaming communities, but hey its just input to an already excellent product.
One can not compare IRC based chat with AJAX based (read more about how AJAX works to understand why there is "delay"), lag can be caused by user having slow internet connection as well.
Not sure what games version for UDP servers should work like.
10 seconds refresh is a very reasonable time, we will be experimenting to see if 6-8 sec refresh will be more suitable or not.