ARSC Really Simple Chat is a simple Web chat app made with PHP and MySQL.
The key features of ARSC Really Simple Chat include easy installation, multiple language support, compatibility with various browsers/platforms (such as text-based ones), a convenient administration interface, private rooms, two-levelled moderation system with message queue and Moderator/VIP roles, graphical smilies, customisable layouts, with options to create varying layouts for individual rooms and/or users, ID-Cards for registered users, with individual guestbooks in every ID-Card, and a text-browser interface that even allows for chatting with braille screen readers.
ARSC is also equipped with excellent security measures, such as using sha1 hashes for passwords and sessionids, and every single user input is checked against a regular expression of allowed values. It also works with PHP 4 and PHP 5, and with safe_mode = On and register_globals = Off. Once installed on your webserver, you can offer a chat interface to the visitors of your site without requiring any special plugins or additional software to chat.
ARSC is free and licensed under the GPL, which means you can use it in your own software projects without any additional costs. The chat interface is user-friendly, and ARSC makes use of modern browser technologies such as frames and JavaScript support. Users with older browsers or with JavaScript disabled can still use ARSC, as it works with every known browser that is still in use nowadays.
Unlike many other PHP/MySQL webchats, ARSC can be run using a non-forking socketserver to handle all message transport. This ensures that the server works very efficiently and can handle more users than other chats that use the httpd process to handle message transport, which can cause a lot of overhead. The socket server of ARSC is entirely written in PHP and does not require any special requirements except for a cgi-bin installation of PHP 4.1.0 or above. Current versions of PHP (4.3.x) have been tested and work. If you're unable to compile a cgi-bin version of PHP or can't start a socket server on your machine, ARSC also offers traditional message handling via the httpd process or even via meta refresh.
In the latest release of ARSC Really Simple Chat, a bug that broke the installation routine was fixed.
Version 3.1 RC1 P1: N/A