Hey all,

I've been working on this project for a while now, it was originally called 'MyChat' or 'MyChatbox' but it was more along the lines of a shoutbox, than a chatbox so it has been named 'JustShout!'.

The entire concept of it is an image based shoutbox. Usual/traditional shoutboxes are hosted on the user's website and can only be viewed on that one page on that one site, this is 'portable' in a sense; you can link to it in any site/forum.

This isn't the first image-based shoutbox, HOWEVER, it is the first image-based shoutbox with emoticons (that I know of)

For instance, these following images are hosted on my site but can be viewed here.

- full sized - a working example can be found on my myspace page here

-or-

- JustShout! mini

At the moment the following things have been implimented:

~Pagination - users can now view older and newer messages in each shoutbox
~Filter search function - users can view posts from a specific user.
~Emoticons are now working in the chatbox.
~Anti-flood system introduced; users can only post two comments consecutively until someone else posts after them, or until 1 hour passes
~Logged in users can now delete unwanted posts from (clean) their own shoutbox
~People who post in a shoutbox can now edit and/or delete their posts up to 72 hours after posting.
~New shoutbox background introduced, making fonts easier to read.
~The poster has a choice from 6 colours and 6 fonts

Coming soon:
~User CP:
-users will be able to make their shoutbox different dimensions.
-users will be able to make a personalised censor list to filter posts with words they may find offensive.


So, what do you guys (and gals) think?

Can you think of any other cool tools and 'things' I could impliment to make it better/more accessible/'cooler'? Would it be worth the effort to try and animate the gif emoticons within the shoutbox?

Want your own JustShout! shoutbox? Click here

Sam

So, when the image is placed on another site, does it work as a shoutbox(you can post to the same shoutbox from multiple sites)? You can do that already with HTML. Of course, It's not as portable as images but it works.

On a forum you can't post a shout, because most don't accept HTML but you can from something like MySpace, where you can include a form or something.

With the image, unlike the HTML you can use it as a forum signature, which is the fundamental use for JustShout.

Some forums do accept HTML(like this one) and usaly those also accept HTML in a signature too.

Would they accept a HTML form? So people could post a comment from this forum, say?

If I decide to allow the form tag.

Just introduced another background to choose from on registration.

The original black background and now a white background. The black one features the font colours: White, Aqua, Yellow, Orange and Green; the white one features: Black, Purple, Blue, Dark Green and Deep red.







What do you think to the new background choice?

When I have made the user CP I will allow users to upload their own backgrounds to the shoutbox.

It looks better. It has a higher contrast and if you post a comment beyond 40 charicters it doesn't try to display over white making ti un readable.

very nice ^^

Thanks. ^^

The user control panel for the full size JustShout! is up and running.

An example of some standard and custom backgrounds:










As you can see, you can also change the size of your chatbox. Anything between 50x60 (if you really wanted anything quite so small), to 999x999. The image you upload will be converted to a png file and then set to 20% transparency for the background; that way the light colours will always show up.

What do you think?

The turtle one looks realy good.

JustAsk! - Question box. You can ask a question at the top of the image and have your friends answer it. Could be "Are you coming to my birthday party" or "Do you like cheese" - basically, it could be anything.



JustSay! - Discussion box. You can post a topic, just like on a forum, and have people discuss said topic.

Users can also name their shoutboxes.

What do you think to that idea? At the moment you can only have one custom background per user; you can have up to 6 shoutboxes, so you can have 1 black shoutbox, 1 white shoutbox and 4 custom shoutboxes (or any number of each, up to 6 in total) but all the custom ones will have the same background. For now.

Sam

Interesting concept, only that it seems like it's a waste of a chatbox(for one question).

The idea was if you put it on a Facebook or a myspace profile or something with your profile set to private then you can ask "Are you coming to my party on Saturday" or whatever it may be. Then people can answer etc.. They can easily change the question when they need. They will be able to then flush the chatbox to get rid of comments for the older question.

Or does it still sound like a waste?

maybe, i mean there are ALOT of shoutboxes out there

A bit. I generaly think of a chat box as similer to a room with people in it.

Not image based, though. That's the thing - there are hundreds upon thousands of flash based and php/html based shoutboxes. However, there are only a select few image based shoutboxes. None of which, as of yet, have emoticons. Other than JustShout!. I'm very close to getting animated gifs in the shoutbox.

I have an exam on Thursday so on Friday or at most Monday it will have animated emoticons.

You forgot that there are also ones that are applet based and AJAX based, but the points still valid.