AJAX extensions to the comment module

i'd have to use this on a couple sites to know the benefits. anyway, a sync tool should probably be a related contrib module, and not srtrictly part of chatroom ... i do think chatroom should use the same meanism for organizing that forums use. just a different vocabulary

I just was thinking about something similar and had a discussion with a friend of mine as I happily stumbled over this issue. As we propably all agree, the forums and the chatrooms are very similar and related to each other. Only difference forums take place over a longer time as Jason mentioned.

The most radikal but simpelest thing I can think of would be a small addition in the forums module. Attach a combobox to each forum thread that aloes you to select a time in which this thread should be updated through an ajax script. Voila, now the live discussion becomes a threads property rather then a seperate content type with a lot of duplicated functionality. You get a classic forum that authorised users could easiely switch in to a live chat if desired and all this will get archived as a usual forum topic.

Let it settle a bit, it might be unconventional at first thought but I realy like this idea of breaking up the classic ways of doing things and combining this features as temporarily needed. There may be a little more to consider but I just wanned to throw in my idea. What do you think? Is this even possible as an forum addon or so?

Ok, I'll give it a try to make my thoughts a little more clear. First I like to mention that I think your initial issue is a very good turn to take. My thoughts may only apply to my problems or way of doing things, so don't bother, or correct me where I'm wrong.

In my experience I often was chatting with pals and we where helping out each other with ideas or knowlege as we all are online the most of the time. These were mostly one on one discussion through icq that eventually got lost in the clients chat history. So I proposed to use forums to share the thoughts or results with others and to build up online searchable knowlege out of it.

Now it appears that we more often help each other through the forums rather then through the chat. Some times the oponent is't available to answer right away and it's convenient to talk, time delayed in the forums, sometimes we can answer, chat right away which lets us hit the refresh button repeatedly as we are waiting for the answer to come in any minute in the forum. So my friend mentioned it to be a great improvement if we could chat, as usual and where able to save or apply some of our chat results to a related forum thread so knowlege doesn't get lost and gets accessable to other people as well. Briefly: "Wouldn't it be great if we could save the chat discussion to a forum, just stripping out some of the unrelated talk." Well, now this seems to be quite near to your initial issue I belive and the chatroom module plus your suggestion would be able to handle our problem.

Now my basic idea was to not create new types like chatrooms (or mailinglists) that all have a similar behavour in managing and storing data at the end and rather extend the forums with these as properties, like, refresh this forum thread every 5 seconds and you've got a chatroom. This could be done with a little checkbox labeled realtime on top of the tread that causes the thread to refresh repeatedly. It should be optional, off by default and could be turned on if needed when the oponent is available saying at least one other person is viewing that thread. As example you are browsing the forums threads, you got a block that indicates which users are viewing this current thread you are viewing, if there are some other people available one may switch that thread to realtime to get a instant chat behaviour, discuss your things, maybe flag the outstanding posts and results to be saved and that discussion gets saved under the forum thread youre just chatted in.

Out of a users view he doesn't have to decide where to go to communicate, search or ask something. In the forums? In the chatrooms archive? In the mailinglists? Or where ever, it's all in one place, the forums. So they won't have to look in several places for getting information related to one thread or deciding where to go to ask something.

This propably won't replace a classic chatroom if this is what one needs, It may won't work for big community sites as drupal is but it would extend the default forum in a way that a chatroom it self isn't that necessary anymore and it may although solve your problem of synching forums and chatrooms because they would become one thread.

As I mentioned, this may just apply to my needs and doesn't seem to solve your issue, but I thought I'll throw it in, as it's related and to get some other opinions and thoughts on it.

This propably won't replace a classic chatroom if this is what one needs

yes, i think that in this issue we will end up (maybe we allready are) discussing about how "ajaxify" drupal

wich is a good thing, i mean, i would love to have things like "who is online" or "recent comments" ajaxified

or even comments behaving like little chats

possibilities are endless...

i did somethinking about this and i think that chat and forum need different hierarchies for organization. then i suggest a contrib module could keep them in sync. as i mentioned before, i think the organizing of chats should happen just like forum.module does it. this can only work if chats are nodes and lobbies are taxonomy terms.

I'm hoping that making chats a CCK field type will eventually allow them to be added to the forum content type.

It seems like what is being asked for is AJAX forums. It's possible that such forums could completely replace chat. I'll search and see if a similar request has been made for the forum module. If not, I'll move this issue there.

Marked issue 116613 as a duplicate of this issue. Also see the Chat group.

seems no one continue this issue?

I had work on a new module that want to add ajax to D6.x.
please find the attachment for the module
it had ajax, but the UI is bad as comment.module in D6.x gives very limit API for other modules to use.
anyone can help with ajax preview comment part?
or rewrite some part of comment.module in D7?

Feature request -> D7

http://drupal.org/project/ajax_comments

If we want this in core there are probably better issues to start from.

Live Update API is a god place to start.
http://drupal.org/project/live_update