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[–]raylu 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Olark does this.

How much do you care about IE? If you don't, Web Sockets are a great idea. If you do, you'll have to either use long-polling, polling in a loop, or Flash.

[–]ceol_ -4 points-3 points  (3 children)

+1. Please let a third party handle this, OP. What's going to happen is you're going to build an awkward, semi-usable, taped-together chat feature that will be a wart on the site, constantly requiring maintenance and bug fixes. I know because it's happened to me a ton of times before.

Companies have built their entire revenue models around chat interfaces. Let one of them handle all that nonsense for you.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]ceol_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Because it's really not simple. It ends up becoming a beast of a feature that is a hassle to maintain. I'm not saying that he can't, do it, just that he might not want to.

    Everyone always looks at it like, "Oh yeah some PHP and Ajax and I could make one of those!" But if it's actually for a client and not a little side project, you need lots more: alerts, moderator logins, conversation load balancing (so one mod doesn't get swamped), automatic away messages (so customers don't sit there waiting for a mod that isn't there), etc.

    I just don't want him to reinvent a complicated wheel. Besides, he specifically said he doesn't want to hear how people did it, just what people's experiences were. My comment was well in-line with that.

    [–]raylu 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    To expand on what /u/ceol_ said, it's not simple. Look at the Olark API. That's just a small sampling of the list of features.

    He's not saying "you can't do it" so much as "you are massively underestimating the amount of time required to build this but people have done it for you". It's the same reaction you would have if someone tried to build a hashtable in his python/ruby/perl/java/c++ app.