Emoticons on the same line as text

[Gee]

Hi,

Great chat system, I love it

Quick question.. Is there anyway of being able to insert emoticons on the same line as your text?

At the moment is you typed this "hello "

It would display in the chatroom like this:

hello


Is it just a case of shrinking the emoticons or is it not that simple?

[fredric]

This is a known problem with Flash, all images in Flash's htmltext fields automatically go to a new line. There's no way around it, as their implementation of html text is flawed.

We will support this in our new which is scheduled for 2011 which will be built using Flex which does have working inline images.

[Gee]

Thanks for the reply.

In that case, is there anyway to turn the emoticons off, other than changing the text refs (ie. : + ) =

Would be nice to see a "no smilies" switch in the admin section as it does start to lag when you have 40+ people in the room on a non-dedicated server.

Cheers

[fredric]

Smilies do not affect performance to any significant degree if your server is well configured. The load comes from the updates of the chat content by each client. The smilies do not reload so are not a problem.

Make sure you have "expires" on though for images, js, swf and css files. The browser will not have to fetch the images again for each reload then. It can be as low as an hour or two, as long as it's on you save yourself a lot of bandwidth and lower the number of HTTP connections.
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-speed-expires.html
http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/apache-speed-last-modified.html

Also try to have "keep alive" disabled as each HTTP connection stays connected longer than needed if it is enabled which tends to increase load on heavily utilized servers. But you mileage may vary.
http://serverfault.com/questions/73812/should-i-activate-keepalive-in-apache2

[o2ictllge3]

In fact I was also thinking about the same issue. If we had the chance to insert the emoticons on the same line as our text then it would have added to their overall appeal. Anyway, since it is a basic problem with Flash I don’t think that it can be rectified.