Chat Bubbles! 1.5

Updated in 1.5: Now far more compatable with other mods. You can choose which boards you want to display in chat bubbles by putting them in the list using the Chat Bubbles! link in YaBB Admin.

The new versions makes a completely separate board printing routine from the default one in Display.pl. You can choose which boards to display in the Chat Bubble format by typing their id in the list editor (it's added to the bottom of the first block of the YaBB Admin).

If you had a board names "General Board" witht he id "general", you'd type general int he list. One entry per line (just like when you re-order the boards)

I'd like feedback on how it works out for everyone who tries it out!

Images CAN'T alternate. You'd need to make two mirrored versions of every single avatar on your website. It's far too much trouble and I've never planned on supporting something like that. Besides that, you couldn't possibly make flipped images for guests who specify their own avatar.

There is one other way you could do it, and that's to find a .pl that contains all the functions for mirroring, rotating, etc gif images. Then you could run whatever gif would be used in the mirrored post through that and save it to a temporary file. However, this would devour your HD space and put a massive strain on the CPU and Disk usage likely to get your server admin's attention and disapproval. If you ran that 2x-5x a day, that wouldn't be a problem. But look at the numbers. It would need to be done for every post viewed and/or responded to by every person who visits your webpage every day. On top of that the fact none of those side images would cache would tack onto your bandwidth and make your page much slower loading for modem users. And to my knowledge, no gif manipulation scripts can handle animated gifs. But one problem we completely ignored there is JPG or PNG avatars, which to my knowledge no perl stuff can manipulate.

Hopefully you see why it's just not worth the trouble... sorry.

As for changing the colors of the bubble. You could use something like Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, etc. They can edit and save transparent gifs. Paint Shop Pro is available in demo form. I think it has a30-day limit or something to that effect.

Oh, you man alternate the color of the bubbles? Yeah that wouldn't be hard. I thought you were talking about flipping the avatars. My bad.

It would be easier for the end user but a much bigger pain to write. When you click modify, it only writes to that board's file. I just went for what would take the least time to write so I could get something fully useable out the door.

These would be great feature ideas for a 2.0

D-BOY wrote on Feb 9^th, 2002 at 9:31pm:


Well, I've been playing with your mod (I hope you don't mind) and I have managed it without too much bother - I just used the announcement board as a guide. As for storing the information in the board's file, as long as you don't clash with any popular mods it works fine.

I'm now trying to move the code that displays the profile and the message into seperate subroutines as they each appear (slightly modified) three times in the file.

@ D-BOY

cool mod and works fine
it was a little problem with the report to moderator mod.the link was not display.i have fix and works 

see on testboard
thanks

yeah i have paint shop pro but im a completely clueless moron around image editors, if someone would be so kind as to explain how to change the color that would be great.. a little in depth step by step tutorial would be much appreciated.


(i tried figureing it out on my own but wound up looking at a white square and then wound up looking at an orange square) oops.

i suck at this.