How to host live chat?

[felipao]

I'm developing a website for a community. I'd like to host now and then a special event chat, where we'd have a special guest who we'd interview. Of course, we don't want everybody to talk at the same time, therefore have an option to mute everybody except the selected interviewers and the special guest.

Any clues as to how I could have this kind of chat on my site? I've searched and come across many chat programs for websites, but none of them had this option to mute a certain group of users.

I thought about doing it irc then, but have not really a clue how to program the irc into my site, so that visitors would not have to worry about the complicated functions.

Any insight, suggestion or help will be greatly appreciated.

/felipao

 

[RJ]

realchat.com and chatblazer.com are two options. Both are over $700

 

[felipao]

Thanks Ron. Seem to be the tools I'd need, but unfortunately I don´t have the money for that kind of investment. Since it´s a community/resource site, at least for now no profit will result from the site.

 

[Padwah]

Depending on your hosting you could look in to using a flash based chat system with a socket server running as the backend, though if you're on a shared host chances are you won't be able to run the socket server to power it.

Failing that if you've got cgi enabled, can't see why not these days, you could install CGI:IRC and then link it to an established IRC channel. You'd then run your chats via irc and your members would use the simple web interface. http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net/

 

[Mr. Websites]

I think the feature you are looking for is called a “moderated chat.” There’s numerous websites that offer this, such as havChat, Webmaster, and ChatBlazer. Obviously, they are all quite expensive. Look around, you’ll find something within your budget.

 

[felipao]

Thanks a lot for the input. Let me see what I can do from here.

Any additional insights are still appreciated though