Chatting by anonymous users

We have to detail what is needed in this feature before proceeding.

It seems to me that it would include an administrative option to "allow anonymous chatting" which would default to FALSE.

Clicking the "Chat now!" link cause the module to check if the user is authenticated or not. If not, it would have ask the user to enter a nickname. Then it would be able generate the appropriate URL for the chat server. My thought would be not to allow a picture for an anonymous user and to prepend their chosen nickname with a string that could be set on the admin settings page.

So if an anonymous user tried to chat with nickname "hacker" their nickname for the chat server would be, say, "(anon)hacker" so they could be distinguished from authenticated users of your site in chats. In my example, the setting would be "(anon)" but folks who did not want such a tag on anonymous chatters could leave it blank.

Other thoughts? How does the proposed spec sound?

-Steve
www.crotown.com

Oops. removed an extra copy of previous post.