This page was created to discuss how to improve the Tcl'ers Chat - JCW
So what's wrong? Well...
There are lots of ways to take this further. Recent experiments with Cgi-irc (a web-based gateway to IRC) and with some experimental code I wrote at http://mini.net/t/ show that there are a number of issues before we have a satisfactory replacement:
My goal for now is to quickly find a few simple and robust solutions to stay out of trouble with CPU load and bandwidth. The CPU load seems to already be making the Tcl'ers Wiki itself sluggish, especially with updates. And the bandwidth... well, I'm starting to reach the limit for this server, and more than 50% of it is the chat. If it grows much further, it'll cost (a small amount of) real bucks.
Here are some ideas for improving this:
A bit further down the line, I'd like to also revisit the idea of having a CGI script which "pushes" a signal that the history has changed. It could be used by TkChat to listen to, instead of doing a periodic page poll/pull. This will need to be optional, since push will not work through all firewalls (proxying ones will probably not allow the push connection to be kept open).
Comments are welcome... what this all is meant to say is that we need to do something about the chat before it becomes a real problem on mini.net.
BBH - I have some ideas that might be helpful here (I've been meaning to send them to the maillist but things have been hectic lately) I'll get then translated from my head into something readable & post later
LV The mailing list to which Bruce refers is the TclersWiki list at yahoo.com - I'm away from my computer right now - is the URL for that group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TclersWiki/ ?