[Darth-Apple]

So as a few of you guys know, I used to have a chat room hosting service for Ajax Chat some number of years ago. We hosted about 600 of them on our little VPS, and it actually made enough money towards the end to break even. Doesn't sound exciting, but on a little chat room hosting service where the only ads were on the login page, it was encouraging. 

Anyway, I'm beyond happy to have the server back from the host. We unfortunately got suspended some number of years ago for apparently not having the DDOS filtering on autopay (my fault completely), but in any case, we have the files back now. I will likely never bring it back (it wouldn't be worthwhile in the age of Discord), but I'm not gonna lie, the idea seems interesting. 

Not sure what I'm gonna do with it at this point, but I might post some of the code in the coming months. We made quite a lot of very neat improvements to it (including an admin panel for settings, real nickname registration, new commands, among other improvements).

[tc4me]

You probably don't know the word boredom either :-), always collecting ideas and then making something new again

[Darth-Apple]

You probably don't know the word boredom either :-), always collecting ideas and then making something new again

Haha I certainly try. Too many.  

I'm probably going to bring Chatcave back, but as an invite-only thing just to maintain the old code. There were a lot of custom modifcations to the script that you couldn't find anywhere else, so I certainly don't want it to die completely. 

I'll have to see if the new server can support it. In the meantime, if anyone wants a chat room with some extra features, bug me until I give in and set it back up. Probably some time before the end of the year.

[tc4me]

You probably don't know the word boredom either :-), always collecting ideas and then making something new again

.............................. In the meantime, if anyone wants a chat room with some extra features, bug me until I give in and set it back up. Probably some time before the end of the year.

  Well, you can't say that twice, hahaha

[Darth-Apple]

It's back in a rough around the edges form. It's code that is 7 years old. It's a lot more than PHP, and is pretty tightly integrated with a specialized nginx configuration, so getting it migrated was a bit of a pain. I think I got it working as it should, but a few links still redirect back to the old domain.

Anyway, Chatcave Chat Hosting is back in testing form, for nostalgic purposes! It does indeed work, if anyone wants to try it out. (Test chat room link). Don't expect much, it's a very old platform.

Back in its day, it used to host about 600 chat rooms (none of which were migrated because I didn't see the point in moving gigabytes of logs). It ran okay even on the tiny server that hosted it.

[SpookyZalost]

@Darth-Apple honestly for what it was, your chatroom service was the cornerstone of a community it's still relevant even now.

[Darth-Apple]

Haha that's quite a compliment @SpookyZalost, I think you just made my night.

I'll bring it back legitimately if anyone thinks it'll be good. It's not discord or anything, but it has the benefit of being simpler and gets the job done for some needs. Not to mention we don't go around storing tons of user's data, and our "competitors" are notorious for it, just because they can.

Right now it's on the same server that hosts MS, along with Saturn Moon. If I brought it back fully, I'd probably not advertise it too much because I wouldn't want 600 chat rooms slowing down Makestation.

Edit: Posted my idea in the Official Ajax Chat forum... Here's hoping.

[tc4me]

HA HA HA, I knew you were doing it again , gut so 

[Guardian]

Now just i the support forums link to point to Makestation.

[Darth-Apple]

Haha yea, it wasn't worth doing a separate support forum after a while. I'm thinking about making it a subdomain of Makestation (e.g. chatcave.makestation.net). It'd use the traffic to help us instead of going to some random site that hosts free chat rooms.

Only downside is that it would force it to be on the same server as MS and Saturn Moon. I think it could handle it, but if it ever blew up like it did last time, I'd have to figure something out. (Completely forgot about domain records, problem solved). Discord exists now, so I doubt we will host 600 chat rooms again.