ARSC Really Simple Chat 3.1 RC1 P1 review

ARSC Really Simple Chat is a Web chat system that uses PHP and MySQL. ARSC Really Simple Chat project works with every browser in

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Manuel Kiessling

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ARSC Really Simple Chat is a Web chat system that uses PHP and MySQL.

ARSC Really Simple Chat project works with every browser in existence, even text-based ones, and it uses the server push technique or, if possible, its own socket server.

It is very simple to install and use ARSC. It includes some important features, such as operators, kick-ing, whispering, and more.

Multiple rooms and different languages are available. To run ARSC on your site, you need a Web server that understands PHP, and can connect to a MySQL database.

Here are some key features of "ARSC Really Simple Chat":
very easy installation
multiple languages supported
multiple browsers/platforms supported (even text-based ones)
comfortable administration interface
private rooms
two-leveled moderation system with message queue and Moderator/VIP roles
graphical smilies
freely definable layouts, with different layouts possible for individual rooms and/or users
ID-Cards for registered users, with individual guestbooks on every ID-Card
text-browser interface even allows chatting with braille screen readers
security: uses sha1 hashes for passwords and sessionids, and every single user input is checked against a regular expression of allowed values
works with PHP 4 and PHP 5
works with safe_mode = On and register_globals = Off

Once installed on your webserver, ARSC provides a chat interface to the visitors of your site. Your visitors need no special plugins or additional software to chat, only their webbrowser. ARSC is licensed under the GPL, which means it is free (like in "free speech"). It also comes at no cost (like in "free beer"). You may even use it in your own software projects.

Chatting with ARSC is very comfortable. If you have a modern browser with frame support and JavaScript support enabled, ARSC makes use of these technologies. If you have an older browser, or you have JavaScript disabled, or even if you have a browser that does not support frames, you can still chat with ARSC. Let me say it this way: With ARSC, chatting on a webpage is possible with every known browser under the sun that is still in use nowadays.

In contrary to many other PHP/MySQL webchats, ARSC can be run using a non-forking socketserver to handle all message transport. Other chats use the httpd process to handle the message transport, what causes a big overhead, while the socketserver of ARSC works very ressource-friendly and can handle way more users. The server is completely written in PHP and thus does not need any special requirements besides a cgi-bin installation of PHP 4.1.0 or above. Current versions of PHP (4.3.x) have been tested and work. If you are not able to compile a cgi-bin version of PHP or you may not start a socketserver on your machine, ARSC still offers the 'traditional' message handling via the httpd process or even via meta refresh.

What's New in This Release:
A bug that broke the installation routine was fixed.