General Questions Help

Copyright Notice Copyright © 2001-2005 Manuel Kiessling This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details. A copy of the GNU General Public License is available at [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html|the GNU website]. You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
Print List FAQs

Questions

  1. Help, I can't login to the Admin panel!
  2. The installation was successful, but the chat message frame remains white, and I can not see what I write!
  3. I get Warning: 'set_time_limit() has been disabled...' upon login!
  4. How about the performance of ARSC, how many users is it able to handle?
  5. What I want to be able to do is have a chat room that only users I have created can log into and/or see.
  6. I want to set up ARSC to use the socket server, how do I do that?
  7. What is the PHP code for displaying who is logged on?

Answers

Question: Help, I can't login to the Admin panel!
Answer  You have to use the account Administrator which was created upon install. Yes, with a capital A! The password was presented to you on the install page. If you forgot to write it down, simply delete all ARSC tables from your MySQL database and re-start the install script.
Question: The installation was successful, but the chat message frame remains white, and I can not see what I write!
Answer  There are a lot of reasons why this might happen. Many mass webhosters do not like chat systems on their servers and therefore disable certain functionality in PHP or Apache that ARSC needs for its streaming version (browser_push). If the webserver is under your control, then you might want to check if ARSC is installed into a directory for which mod_gzip or mod_ssl is enabled. Because with browser_push ARSC streams the content to the browser of the user, these Apache modules have to be disabled for ARSC. If you are not able to disable this modules, then go to the admin interface, section Parameters, and change the parameter disable_browser_push from no to yes.
Question: I get Warning: 'set_time_limit() has been disabled...' upon login!
Answer  This means that your PHP installation has Safe Mode enabled, and the function set_time_limit, which is required to use the browser_push mode of ARSC, has been disabled. Please ask your system administrator to enable set_time_limit for you. If this is not possible, then go to the admin interface, section Parameters, and change the parameter disable_browser_push from no to yes.
Question: How about the performance of ARSC, how many users is it able to handle?
Answer  Testing of ARSC on a LAMP server in 2009 suggests that the maximum capacity may be around 75 new messages per second, or 75 users who type a new line every second. The number of readers will be greater, as most people do not type that fast and there are longer pauses between messages. A tuned server using tools such as lighttpd and Varnish should have greater capacity.
Question: What I want to be able to do is have a chat room that only users I have created can log into and/or see.
Answer  Currently, the only thing which you can enforce is that only registered users may log in (Admin -> Parameters -> register_force) - but everybody is free to register. You can, however, delete the file that handles registration:

yourarscdirectory/base/register.php

You should also remove the link to this file, go to Admin -> Layouts -> Default and have a look at "template_home", delete the line:
<a href="register.php?arsc_language=<%current_language%>"><%lang_clicktoregister%></a>

Question: I want to set up ARSC to use the socket server, how do I do that?
Answer  Just go to:

http://www.example.com/chat/base/admin/

Go to Parameters and set socketserver_use to yes.
Then start the socket server. To do this, logon into your server and go to yourarscdirectory/server/, then type:
php arsc_chatd.php &

and press enter. Now the server is up and running! Login to the chat as always.
Question: What is the PHP code for displaying who is logged on?
Answer  If you would like to show the visitors of your site which users are currently logged into the chat, this code might be what you are looking for:
<?php
$myc = mysql_connect("TheMySQLServer", "TheMySQLUser", "TheMySQLPassword");
mysql_select_db("TheDatabaseOfARSC", $myc);

$query = mysql_query("SELECT user FROM arsc_users", $myc);
while($result = mysql_fetch_array($myc))
{
 echo $result["user"]."<br />\n";
}

mysql_close($myc);
?>

Where TheMySQLServer, TheMySQLUser, TheMySQLPassword and TheDatabaseOfARSC are the same values you used for ARSC, in the file config.inc.php.