ok here's the skinny on this. I suspected this, but wanted to make sure I was right before posting anything. There is no way we are going to be able have an IRC chat at TWG. There is no free software that will handle more then 10 or so people on at once, and those have to be run off of someones computer. Now you might say, "but we're never going to have that many people on at once!" But we all know that once the server frezzes once you'll all be yelling at me for setting up a lousey server. And frankly if I'm going to do this its going to be done right.
Now we can get some nice ones that run serverside for about $1,500 and even a few not so nice ones for $500. We even could get some decent ones that run on a PC for a $100-$200. But I'm not spending that kind of money on you people.
The other option is a PHP/HTML or PHP/flash chat (which I recomed over the PHP/HTML as will become appernt why). There's 2 different types of PHP chats. The first isn't realy a chat, it's a psudo-chat. How it works is you type and send you messages to a database or a TXT file, then there's Java code that makes your browser automaticaly refresh after a set number of seconds. It's not real time, and your HTML page will be refreshing every few seconds (the recomended is 8). If there's a flash program wraped around it you'll never notice the refresh. The second option is to create a PHP socket server, and I've got the nicest GPL one that you can get. The problem here is that most hosting companies don't allow you to run said sockets for more then POP e-mail retreveing. Aslo you have to have access to CLI (command line interface) which I doubt Tage has.
The first PHP chat type I could have done in a matter of hours, the second one (if it would run on TWGs hosted account) wouldn''t be quite a qucikly done since it requires you to actualy know what the code all means to interface with it.
