CodingJungle

quick update: had to work late yesterday, will be home in a few hours (and it was a "ice day" today, so the kids have been home all day, lots of pent up energy...), hopefully i can get it up tonight or tomorrow at the latest

as i mentioned, its been extremely busy lately. like today got called in on emergency at work (7 am yesterday), its now 5:30am and just got home a little bit ago. the update has been posted.

well they are technically there, they just don't realize they are there or not noticing it. you can disable the online list for the widget, it wont add them to the room's online list (this is one of the reasons why the widget room exists, but doesn't show up for the room lists).

As some of you have noticed, i seemed to have either abandoned my apps or just disappeared. fear not, i am still actively developing and around. the reason for radio silence, life. as some of you know i do have a job outside of my development, we took on a new contract there from several local business and were upgrading their systems, so i was quite busy (as i usually work from home, but this last several weeks, i was out in the field).
the other even that happened, like most, i have a laptop and a desktop and i also have roommates. I usually use my laptop thru out the day to do things with and at night, its the domain of my sisters children (for school) and/or my sister (for her work) and i use my desktop. however at the beginning of the year, i purchased a new motherboard and cpu (any one curious it was a ryzen 6 1600) and a new monitor (a samsung 4k tv). well after a few days, my gpu died (gtx 970) and i was forced to go back to my intel cpu/mobo to use it's onboard gpu (as ryzen doesn't have one) and i was limited to 30hz on my new monitor (and it was causing me headaches) so i was unable to work, till late in the evening (around 9pm) but that was nearing my bedtime (as i was getting up around 4am for my other job). I have finally (after almost 5 weeks in RMA) have received a replacement and my desktop back in the rotation.
so these two events left me with very limited time to keep up with everything, but i am back now. I am also looking to hire a friend of mine who is familiar with my apps, to help me out in times like this, but i will need to bring him up to speed as things like the babble chat service can be daunting to some one who is unfamiliar with how it operates.
Over the next few weeks i will be addressing the outstanding issues and reports i have. monday i will be releasing a updated versions of downloads plus to address a few issues that have cropped up in it and to introduce a few new features that have been requested.

As some of you have noticed, i seemed to have either abandoned my apps or just disappeared. fear not, i am still actively developing and around. the reason for radio silence, life. as some of you know i do have a job outside of my development, we took on a new contract there from several local business and were upgrading their systems, so i was quite busy (as i usually work from home, but this last several weeks, i was out in the field).
the other even that happened, like most, i have a laptop and a desktop and i also have roommates. I usually use my laptop thru out the day to do things with and at night, its the domain of my sisters children (for school) and/or my sister (for her work) and i use my desktop. however at the beginning of the year, i purchased a new motherboard and cpu (any one curious it was a ryzen 6 1600) and a new monitor (a samsung 4k tv). well after a few days, my gpu died (gtx 970) and i was forced to go back to my intel cpu/mobo to use it's onboard gpu (as ryzen doesn't have one) and i was limited to 30hz on my new monitor (and it was causing me headaches) so i was unable to work, till late in the evening (around 9pm) but that was nearing my bedtime (as i was getting up around 4am for my other job). I have finally (after almost 5 weeks in RMA) have received a replacement and my desktop back in the rotation.
so these two events left me with very limited time to keep up with everything, but i am back now. I am also looking to hire a friend of mine who is familiar with my apps, to help me out in times like this, but i will need to bring him up to speed as things like the babble chat service can be daunting to some one who is unfamiliar with how it operates.
Over the next few weeks i will be addressing the outstanding issues and reports i have. monday i will be releasing a updated versions of downloads plus to address a few issues that have cropped up in it and to introduce a few new features that have been requested.

As some of you have noticed, i seemed to have either abandoned my apps or just disappeared. fear not, i am still actively developing and around. the reason for radio silence, life. as some of you know i do have a job outside of my development, we took on a new contract there from several local business and were upgrading their systems, so i was quite busy (as i usually work from home, but this last several weeks, i was out in the field).
the other even that happened, like most, i have a laptop and a desktop and i also have roommates. I usually use my laptop thru out the day to do things with and at night, its the domain of my sisters children (for school) and/or my sister (for her work) and i use my desktop. however at the beginning of the year, i purchased a new motherboard and cpu (any one curious it was a ryzen 6 1600) and a new monitor (a samsung 4k tv). well after a few days, my gpu died (gtx 970) and i was forced to go back to my intel cpu/mobo to use it's onboard gpu (as ryzen doesn't have one) and i was limited to 30hz on my new monitor (and it was causing me headaches) so i was unable to work, till late in the evening (around 9pm) but that was nearing my bedtime (as i was getting up around 4am for my other job). I have finally (after almost 5 weeks in RMA) have received a replacement and my desktop back in the rotation.
so these two events left me with very limited time to keep up with everything, but i am back now. I am also looking to hire a friend of mine who is familiar with my apps, to help me out in times like this, but i will need to bring him up to speed as things like the babble chat service can be daunting to some one who is unfamiliar with how it operates.
Over the next few weeks i will be addressing the outstanding issues and reports i have. monday i will be releasing a updated versions of downloads plus to address a few issues that have cropped up in it and to introduce a few new features that have been requested.

sorry guys, i've been unavailable for awhile. i'll update you with what was/is going on tonight.

sorry guys, i've been unavailable for awhile. i'll update you with what was/is going on tonight.

haven't finished it yet, a few other things took over my life when working on it and haven't had a chance to get back to it yet.
the language string exist in both the regular lang and jslang portions, the key is "babble_disconnection". when i searched for it in the language pack, 2 came up (one is for the php side of things, the other is for the js side). 

Its an error in the AS code trying to do a look up on a column that doesn't exist in the kw table. I've corrected the issue and will be releasing an update after a more thorough test this time to make sure its not causing any other issues. 

I have a check to see if the method "container" exits, but container() method appears to throw an exception, if the 'container' isn't set in the $databaseColumnMap. i'll wrap it in a try/catch so it doesn't print it to log in the future.
 

yes it is coming soon  and it will have the user store banner option. 

I am working on a new version of it, i've had reports that delete doesn't currently work in the acp/modcp.

i've recently merged their two codebases, so they are relatively the "same" when it comes to what is under the hood. the chat service version communicates a bit differently (as it has an additional check to make sure the connected users belong to a site that is authorized to use the chat service).
Advantages of Self Hosted over the chat service:
no limit on how many users can be connected, this will be limited by how many your server could handle. continues to function if you let your renewal expire (unless there is something in IPS that breaks it on an upgrade). Disadvantages of Self Hosted over the chat service:
limited support (as i will only address issues that are directly caused by the PHP app and in babble.js, any issues stemming from node.js/server configuration i don't cover). no port blocking. a lot of public/work networks will block any ports outside of 80/443. the chat service uses SSL URL so port 443 is used by default. for me the chat service is more ideal, as the self hosted just this year alone has racked up about 250 hours in support, but the chat service (counting its testing period from november of last year) has roughly been 15 hours. the biggest support issue with the chat services seems to be the keys don't want to always activate (not sure what is causing it, as it is a nexus license key api i'm using), but this has only happened to 3 of the people who have subscribed to it, and i can always manual activate in that instance. There is also the upto 2 hour wait time after activation or private key update, that some have complained about (after activation or private key update, which rarely happens, it can take up to 2 hours before the chat service registers your license key).

i've recently merged their two codebases, so they are relatively the "same" when it comes to what is under the hood. the chat service version communicates a bit differently (as it has an additional check to make sure the connected users belong to a site that is authorized to use the chat service).
Advantages of Self Hosted over the chat service:
no limit on how many users can be connected, this will be limited by how many your server could handle. continues to function if you let your renewal expire (unless there is something in IPS that breaks it on an upgrade). Disadvantages of Self Hosted over the chat service:
limited support (as i will only address issues that are directly caused by the PHP app and in babble.js, any issues stemming from node.js/server configuration i don't cover). no port blocking. a lot of public/work networks will block any ports outside of 80/443. the chat service uses SSL URL so port 443 is used by default. for me the chat service is more ideal, as the self hosted just this year alone has racked up about 250 hours in support, but the chat service (counting its testing period from november of last year) has roughly been 15 hours. the biggest support issue with the chat services seems to be the keys don't want to always activate (not sure what is causing it, as it is a nexus license key api i'm using), but this has only happened to 3 of the people who have subscribed to it, and i can always manual activate in that instance. There is also the upto 2 hour wait time after activation or private key update, that some have complained about (after activation or private key update, which rarely happens, it can take up to 2 hours before the chat service registers your license key).

i've recently merged their two codebases, so they are relatively the "same" when it comes to what is under the hood. the chat service version communicates a bit differently (as it has an additional check to make sure the connected users belong to a site that is authorized to use the chat service).
Advantages of Self Hosted over the chat service:
no limit on how many users can be connected, this will be limited by how many your server could handle. continues to function if you let your renewal expire (unless there is something in IPS that breaks it on an upgrade). Disadvantages of Self Hosted over the chat service:
limited support (as i will only address issues that are directly caused by the PHP app and in babble.js, any issues stemming from node.js/server configuration i don't cover). no port blocking. a lot of public/work networks will block any ports outside of 80/443. the chat service uses SSL URL so port 443 is used by default. for me the chat service is more ideal, as the self hosted just this year alone has racked up about 250 hours in support, but the chat service (counting its testing period from november of last year) has roughly been 15 hours. the biggest support issue with the chat services seems to be the keys don't want to always activate (not sure what is causing it, as it is a nexus license key api i'm using), but this has only happened to 3 of the people who have subscribed to it, and i can always manual activate in that instance. There is also the upto 2 hour wait time after activation or private key update, that some have complained about (after activation or private key update, which rarely happens, it can take up to 2 hours before the chat service registers your license key).

to be frank, this sounds like something is restarting the babble app in nodejs on the server. most of the recent versions since 2.4.0 have all been to address problems you have reported, the original "problem" that you ran into with 2.4.0 was a change that was made to fix a "ghosting" issue. before the online list was stored on both the user side and in babble.js, but storing it on the user side and then just "updating" it only on the client side when new user joined and removing "dead" ones, was causing the ghosting. so now the list is stored and updated only in the babble.js, then sent to the clients each time a new person comes in or logs off. connected clients also periodically send a "heart beat" to babble.js to let it know that the user is still connected, this will also cause to send out new list every once in awhile too. 
today i installed 5 browsers onto my two laptops, desktop and the kids desktop and grabbed every available tablet in my house (which there are 7) and logged into each with a different user. so i had 27 people logged in. i let them set for about  3 1/2 to 4 hours, i would  let them go idle and every 10 or 20 minutes i would go around to all them clicking the idle message to return to the chat. some i even setup to refresh the page every 5 or 10 minutes, to duplicate exiting and entering. so i spent a great deal of time today attempting to duplicate any possible issue, across a myriad of devices and OS's (my two laptops run ubuntu linux, my desktop and the kids computer were windows 10 and 5 of the tablets are fireOS, 1 is android 7.1.1 and the last is iOS 10.3.3). 
I will send out a mass email from my site here in a bit, to ask any one with a self hosted package that purchased there to let me know if they are having any issues with the online list with these latest updates. i also ask any who have purchase here, to either post here or send me PM to let me know if you are having any issues with the online list, cause right now i'm dead in the water with what could be happening as i am a 100% certain i can not reproduce this. 

yes, but these are ideas for "Commerce Plus"

i've thought about making something for forums like adding in community moderation (like setting a threshold when a post is rated down, and its positive to negative ratio hits the threshold it's content gets "hidden" like a spoiler and flagged for moderators to look at to see if it needs removed). i've also thought about doing a catgory-less forums, have everything tag driven, and add in hashtags like twitter has, that can be searched for and what not, but it appeared IPS was going to be adding them in, but that doesn't appear to have happened yet. i've also thought about making a "chan" style addition to forums, where anonymity is the name of the game, and its made mostly for sharing images. i also like the threaded nature of say reddit and tumblr, thought about adding those into forums as well.
i've never really used gallery, I've always been fond of pinterest, but not sure how many others have been. blogs imho is a lost cause, its not a very interesting app to begin with. commerce i would be open to making changes to it, the one thing i've been wanting for a long time is front end submissions, paid submissions, and even actual digital downloads, as i use it on my site, and each of my downloads get linked to a product. it be nice to offer it directly in commerce instead of having downloads.
i've thought about generalizing questions and answers after i rework it (right now it works, but its kinda plain and has a few bugs in it), and the tab ordering, and the amazon style review additions i did in downloads plus and bring those features to the other apps that use them. as long as they use the node/item/comment/review class's, i could introduce those features to 'em.
if you have any suggestions for other "plus" apps, i am always considering new apps.
 
 

i've thought about making something for forums like adding in community moderation (like setting a threshold when a post is rated down, and its positive to negative ratio hits the threshold it's content gets "hidden" like a spoiler and flagged for moderators to look at to see if it needs removed). i've also thought about doing a catgory-less forums, have everything tag driven, and add in hashtags like twitter has, that can be searched for and what not, but it appeared IPS was going to be adding them in, but that doesn't appear to have happened yet. i've also thought about making a "chan" style addition to forums, where anonymity is the name of the game, and its made mostly for sharing images. i also like the threaded nature of say reddit and tumblr, thought about adding those into forums as well.
i've never really used gallery, I've always been fond of pinterest, but not sure how many others have been. blogs imho is a lost cause, its not a very interesting app to begin with. commerce i would be open to making changes to it, the one thing i've been wanting for a long time is front end submissions, paid submissions, and even actual digital downloads, as i use it on my site, and each of my downloads get linked to a product. it be nice to offer it directly in commerce instead of having downloads.
i've thought about generalizing questions and answers after i rework it (right now it works, but its kinda plain and has a few bugs in it), and the tab ordering, and the amazon style review additions i did in downloads plus and bring those features to the other apps that use them. as long as they use the node/item/comment/review class's, i could introduce those features to 'em.
if you have any suggestions for other "plus" apps, i am always considering new apps.
 
 

this option is already there. go to ACP->Community->Downloads->Settings, click on the "Downloads Plus" Tab, and scroll below the "Status" stuff, you should see "Author Files" Header, and with the two options for author files, if random is enabled it will go by random, if disabled it will do by date. you can also set how many to display. i should remind you "random" can be a bit "costly" on the db query if there are a lot of files. so if you are having slow queries, its more than likely it. if it becomes an issue, i'll setup a "cache" for it and have it refresh every 10 minutes or so.
other apps took precedent last week and this week (babble mainly), this weekend it will probably be duplicate member app, its been neglected. if it was a kid and i was its father, it would be in a state home for how badly i've neglected it. so hopefully next week i can turn my attention back to downloads plus, get questions redone and finish up guides and roadmaps and add in a few other features i've been thinking about (like a full listing of support reports for any of the files i have, as it is tedious going between files lol).

2.4.2 was the last version. 2.4.3 was just released. Make sure u have the right one the self hosted and chat service has the same version now

babble self hosted and chat service 2.4.3 both released, has the room fix in it, and further tweaks to the "online list" to improve reliability (noticed an issue last night with guest accounts). 

it is a codemirror editor (as a lot of request when i first came out with it was to allow full html useage, and the cke editor doesn't allow that). it doesn't do template logic at this time, but i might consider adding it in a future version, as it is n't "hard" to do, and i do something similar already in my CJ Menu application, so i could probably scarf the code from it. 
so to answer your question, it can do bbc, some editor stuff and raw html and of course plain text  

the sounds are working for me if they are enabled, i can't reproduce that issue at all. i am releasing 2.4.2 where i have loosened up the timings a bit on the babble.js
 
 
there are two css classes that get applied to the keywords they are "keyword" and "keywordurl" that you can style in your customs.css to make them appear any way you like.
at this time you can't use external API's, but you can link to IPS Page Databases (as you can create a URL keyword and provide the link to the record). 
they are done at display runtime,  so they always appear "up to date".