[WEB4LIB] Free or low-cost chat

[Michael Sauers]

> I've searched around on several lists, including this one.  I've read a
> lot about reference via chat, but this is different.  Let's say you were
> planning to offer weekly chat sessions for a specific user community,
> and you didn't want to spend a lot of money.  Know of a good free or
> low-cost chat server, reasonably reliable, good features?  (I lean
> toward low-cost vs.  free if it means not getting bombarded with tacky
> ads...)  Particularly one that supports providing a URL you can publish?

Well, here @ BCR we've played with one that's free and written in less than
100 lines of Perl. It's not exactly feature rich but it works, it's easy for
chat novices, there's no ads and you can customize it right into your site.
You can look at the instructions I wrote @
http://www.bcr.org/~ids/DistLearn/chat.html which includes a link to the
chat page itself at the bottom.

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Michael Sauers, Internet Trainer
Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR)
Aurora, CO :: msauers at bcr.org :: http://www.bcr.org/~msauers/
WWW Library Directory @ http://www.webpan.com/msauers/libdir/
Opinions expressed are my own unless otherwise noted.
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