Ability to change maxlength of chat message field (currently too short) [#644962]

I've been using the module for several months now to create chatrooms. It works well, but when chatting, we regularly need to type more text in an individual message than the "Type here:" field currently allows. We work around this at the moment by typing a "..." at the end of the message and continuing with a "..." at the beginning of a new message.

It would be great if the textfield "maxlength" for the "Type here:" field could be configurable on the im module configuration page. Better yet, it would be great if the admin could choose between a textfield or a multi-line text area (and could specify how many text area rows to show by default).

I'd eventually love to see this configurable for each individual chatroom, but if that is too complex to implement right now, having one global setting for all chatrooms would be fine.

Does this feature seem feasible?

Happy chatting,
Ben

Comments

Comment #1

pahariwalla CreditAttribution: pahariwalla commented 28 November 2009 at 20:52

Issue tags:

+ui, +chatroom, +quick

Not too bad to implement, but probably not on on a room by room basis.

Comment #2

pahariwalla CreditAttribution: pahariwalla commented 1 December 2009 at 00:43

committed to rev 1.9.2.21 of im.module

New options in settings allow you to choose between textfield (default, and what was already there) and textarea

with textarea you can adjust both width and height

I've also increased the maxlength from 160 to 255 (the size of the database field that holds the text). I can also increase the DB field, but I didn't want to get into DB updates thus revision.

Please let me know what you think would be an acceptable field length, and if there are developers out there that can give me a good reason not to change this from varchar(255) to TEXT, please let me know !

Happy copiously verbose chatting