Specialized Chat Setups

Firewall Issues
Auditorium Events
Moderated Chat in One Room
Online Classrooms and Web Tours
Resources

Firewall Issues

Some firewalls restrict access to only port 80, which is the port number web servers operate on. You can allow chat access through port 80 if you do the following:

• Your Web Crossing server must be running in DWS mode on port 80
• The Chat Client port must be set to port 80
• There can be no other applications using port 80 on the same server, even under a different IP address
• The chat server IP and the direct web service IP must be the same

It's possible to use SOCKS protocol to allow users inside and outside a firewall to communicate in chat. See the Sysop Documentation for more details.

Auditorium Events

You can set up Auditorium-type events using Web Crossing chat. Be aware that a large number of chatters may also require you to set up one or more fanout servers for extra chat capacity.

The setup described below will provide three rooms:

An Audience room, where your visitors can chat amongst themselves or send questions to the stage via an Ask Question button. The stream of conversation from the Stage is also presented in this room in a read-only fashion.

A Backstage room, where questions from the audience are received by a moderator. Clicking on the question in the chat window will automatically transfer it to the message input box for modification. Pressing Return will send it to the Stage.

The Stage, where the interviewer/host and the guest are alone, and can talk freely. Their chat stream is available in the Audience room.

Personnel needed:

You definitely need a coordinator to track the event and keep in touch with everyone to keep the event organized.

You probably want to have one chat host in each Audience room if you can.

Your Audience members will only need to be in one room at a time: the Audience room. They will see the chat stream from the Stage as well as chat from users in their own room.

Your Moderator, the one who will screen and edit questions and send them to the Stage, needs to be in the Backstage room, and may wish to be in the Stage as well to monitor conversation there. The Moderator will automatically receive questions from the Audience rooms and be able to send them on, editing if desired, to the Stage.

The Guest and Interviewer need to be in the Stage room, and may also wish to be in the Backstage room. Their chat stream in the Stage is visible to all the Audience rooms.

Setting up the rooms:

Setting up this specialized chat application requires some knowledge of webx.tpl files and macros. We suggest you review those sections first if you've not done so already.

First, find and download the questionchat.tpl file from the Lundeen ftp server.
(ftp://ftp.webcrossing.com/pub/WebCrossing/Extras/Templates/questionchat.tpl)
This macro will only work with Web Crossing chat 1.3.5 or greater.

This is how to set everything up:

1. Create 3 rooms in your Web Crossing database as follows
   • Audience - Check Allow Anonymous and assign the Chat Room Template: Audience
   • BackStage - Don't check Allow Anonymous, and assign the Chat Room Template: Backstage
   • Stage - Don't check Allow Anonymous, and assign the Chat Room Template: Stage
2. Edit the macro in the .tpl file called setChatRoomVars to correspond to the chat room unique ID numbers that were created in step 1.
   You can find these numbers by looking at the URLs to enter each room. Be sure to include the leading period (.).
3. Edit the 3 macros, Audience, Backstage, and Stage as you wish, adding HTML or additional chat parameters to suit your particular situation.
4. Copy the file of macros (questionchat.tpl) into your existing webx.tpl file.
5. Edit the access rights for the various rooms as appropriate:
   • Stage: limited access for regular audience and full access for the Host, Guest, and Interviewer.
     1. Host, guest, interviewer, and sysop: host access
     2. Registered users: read-only access
     3. Guest users: read-only access
   • Audience room: This room should be open to everyone as necessary.
     1. Host, guest, interviewer, and sysop: host access
     2. Registered users: participant
     3. Guest users: participant
   • Backstage room: This room should be closed to everyone except the moderator/host.
     1. Host, guest, interviewer, moderator (one who screens and sends questions) and sysop: host access
     2. Registered users: no access
     3. Guest users: no access
6. Edit the Audience room (but NOT the Backstage room) to make the Stage room the main room. This is done by editing the Audience room and adding the Stage room unique ID in the "Main Room for this table" box.
7. Go to the Control Panel > Reset file cache for HTML files and webx.tpl templates and click there to reset the cache.
8. Test all of the rooms and have enough people in the Audience to force an overflow room to make sure that you have all of the permissions set correctly.

Moderated Chat in One Room

If you're expecting a small crowd, and want to allow the guest direct access to the audience, you can moderate a chat using "crowd control" techniques rather than software changes. This technique is known as "protocol."

Give the sysop and hosts Host access, and everyone else Participant access.

Instruct the users, as they come into the room, that when they wish to ask a question, they can put a single ? onscreen. When they want to make a comment, then can use a !. Otherwise they should remain silent until they are called on. This can be done via private messages if you wish, or in the HTML around the chat room or on the preceding page.

One host will act as the Keeper of the Queue - in other words, the person who keeps track of who's in line to ask questions. Putting the queue onscreen occasionally reminds the interviewer whose question comes next, and allows users in line to know when their turn is coming up.

The Interviewer will call on each user in turn to ask their question, and the guest can respond.

Online Classrooms and Web Tours

You can set up the HTML around your chat applet so that the bottom frame is the applet and the top frame is a content frame.

In this way, as the host, you can "push" content into the top frame for classroom use or to provide a "web tour" of sites you've selected.

This is how to set up something like this:

1. Create a chat room and give yourself host privileges there.
2. Set up a frameset containing the chat applet in the bottom half of the page and a beginning content frame in the top half of the page.
3. Code the bottom frame to call your chat room URL (something like http://www.webxharbor.com/webx?196@@.ee6b9d8)



Note: If you have a banner, footer, or extraneous material in your chat room page, you probably will want to create a bare-bones chat template (minus a banner, for instance) and put it in your webx.tpl file. In the Edit area of the chat room, assign your bare-bones template to this room. See the Templates pages for more detail.



4. Create an HTML page, if necessary, for the top, content, frame of your frameset.
5. Upload your frameset to the web.
6. Go to your frameset URL and the chat room should load in the bottom frame.
7. To change the content in the top frame, use this formula, typed into the message line:
   • Command: ))f framename URL
   • Example: ))f bottom http://www.lundeen.com/
   • NOTE: This must be a FULL URL to a WWW resource (.html, .gif or .jpeg, etc.).
8. The commands you enter are stored and latecomers are shown the list of commands, as quickly as Web Crossing can serve them, to keep visitors current. To clear the command list, use these commands:
   • Command: /d clearCommandList
   • Example: /d clearCommandList

Resources

Sysop Documentation

• syschat.htm
• syschat.htm#socks (firewall information)

Sysop Control Panel

• Chat Services
• Chat Status

Web Crossing FAQ

• Operating chat through a firewall