Is there any work being done towards buddy invites?

This is, of course, the main feature that Chatroom lacks. At various points I've even considered enabling AjaxIM *with* Chatroom just to achieve this functionality. Needless to say, I would love to see this implemented.

The current maintainer of this project, however, is trying to find a replacement maintainer and is probably not interested in adding any new features to it. That means we're stuck waiting until someone else comes along who knows enough PHP and Ajax to write the code. I certainly don't... but I hope to learn one of these days.

There is already a feature built into Chatroom that monitors who is online. For ease of use, instead of displaying the list of users, Chatroom should only show user-organized groups of their Buddies (via Buddylist or User Relationships) in a collapsible-menu style. (The menus should expand to show the users in each group.) Then the code would have to be worked out to actually do the inviting: the inviter would click another user's name, and the invitee should see an accept/reject popup, and if Accept is selected the invitee must be redirected to the appropriate Chat page. That still leaves out the ability to have personal chats, however.

So as you can see, it's a fairly enormous task and IMO one would be better off starting with AjaxIM and expanding it to take Chatroom's functionality than starting with Chatroom and going the other way.

There's also another option, phpFreeChat (I think that's the name - phpMyChat maybe?) which has never worked for me but might fill your needs.

Again, it would be ideal to combine AjaxIM and Chatroom and just let the admin decide which features to use (they'd be separated into sub-modules I imagine). Unfortunately this doesn't look like it's going to happen...

I've never gotten AjaxIM to work either, probably because of mod_proxy which you pointed out (thanks BTW, I didn't know that).

Hopefully we'll have a better solution by the time Drupal 6 becomes antiquated.
--Ice

See the Chat Road Map. This represents what I would like to work on. Feel free to contribute your thoughts. The main idea is to make the code more modular so you can combine features from different projects to do whatever you want.

I have asked for volunteers because I am currently tied up with commercial projects, and unfortunately none of them uses this module. I am hoping some donations come in so that I can take time off to work on Chat Room after these projects are done, but I probably need to do more than put a donate button on the Chat Room project page.

Volunteers would not necessarily need to write the code for new features. Just helping to support existing versions would free others to work on new features.