Stable, private chat rooms...

October 27, 2007 8:07 AM

Let's say I have a small group of people -- 10 and under -- and I want to provide a stable, private chat room that participants can enter and exit at will. Let's further say that I would want whatever software that provides this to account for different technical skills (no command-prompts) and when everyone leaves the room it isn't taken down needing to be recreated again in the future? Proprietary software is fine. For Profit software is fine. (Free is better!! ;-)
posted by tcv to technology (12 answers total)

How about Campfire?
posted by arimathea at 8:19 AM on October 27, 2007

I've been very happy with Lingr for this very purpose.
posted by Remy at 8:33 AM on October 27, 2007

seconding campfire
posted by special-k at 8:46 AM on October 27, 2007

A private IRC or Jabber server. Use the Pidgin or Trillian IM clients and configure them to automatically join the channel(s).
posted by rhizome at 9:03 AM on October 27, 2007

Campfire sounds exactly what you want.
posted by chunking express at 9:23 AM on October 27, 2007

nthing campfire
posted by Baud at 9:33 AM on October 27, 2007

I'm a longtime IRC person myself. Several of the modern networks like Dalnet have features that allow you to register and reserve your nicknames, automatically reserve channels (they function like chatrooms but are called channels), make a channel password protected or invite-only, and save an "op-list" of people with the ability to kick out trouble-makers or invite new folks. Find out more -- including both web access and a link to software -- here.
posted by ilsa at 9:59 AM on October 27, 2007

phpmychat works fine for me. you can check it out on my server
shoot if you want you can just use it on my server
posted by DJWeezy at 11:13 AM on October 27, 2007

Campfire, absolutely.
posted by dmd at 12:40 PM on October 27, 2007

Campfire was my first thought.
posted by clh at 1:16 PM on October 27, 2007

A little more difficult to setup... but WASTE is private/encrypted and supports file-trading--> http://waste.sourceforge.net/
posted by jmnugent at 2:30 PM on October 27, 2007

I use X7 chat for just this purpose.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 5:12 AM on October 28, 2007