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  • Michael

    Babble 2.8

    By Michael, in General,

    I've released babble 2.8 today. please upgrade asap. I will only be keeping the old chat service open till the end of this month (maybe sooner if everyone upgrades before then). 
    If you run into any problems (like it not connecting) it might be a domain propagation issue, only thing that can resolve that is time. also check to verify your license key and email are correct. if you continue to have issues, feel free to send me a PM. 
    Regards,
    Michael
  • Michael
    I know babble 3.0.0 has probably seemed like vaporware for awhile now. well today i am announcing i'm suspending its development for a few reasons.
    overly ambitious: babble v3 had a lot of features and changes being made to the core of babble. this was overly ambitious move, considering how much work was involved, to make changes that a lot of people were "luke warm" too.  feature creep: i kept adding new and more features, instead of refining the ones already there. no market: babble has never been a stellar selling app, its been "modest" to put it simply. i've gotten busier in my business and have to make some concessions. i don't bring in enough to hire additional developers and babble doesn't perform well enough to warrant many hours to rewrite the application. so v3 is suspended for now. however i have began work on v2.8, which will be combining features from v3 that were done that can be backported to v2.8
    new features and improvements:
    message template: this has been updated to be more "streamlined". avatars are always visible now, with username above the message, same with the time/date. this frees up the horizontal space, to allow better responsiveness. commands: commands have been improved with room restrictions. you can now enable which groups can use commands, and then which rooms the commands are available in. editor: with my work with stratagem, i've become quite intimidate with the CKEditor, so since the legwork was already done in that application that allows me to overcome a lot of the limitations i originally had with it when i began work with babble years ago. command list editor plugin: this will be automatically loaded fore babble, this will give a list of available commands for the room based on the user group. bots: bots have been changed around, they are now independent of "rooms". you can create one and share them among rooms. you can also limit the bot to groups.  connections: several improvements to the node.js have been introduce that should help with receiving messages specifically targeted to your, your group and your room.  removal of guest messaging: this code was bulky and actually was the cause of several bugs, so i've completely removed it. sorry to anyone who actually used it. guest will still be able to view the room, they just wont be able to see the online list or participate in the conversation. chat service activation: this process has been troublesome, some servers wont send the required information to activate properly, so i've streamlined this process a bit, so instead of having to activate, i've made some changes to allow easier activation. hopefully activation problems will be a thing of the past. message dialog: commands can now open up dialog boxes to display their info instead of showing in the chat window like they use too. this ability can be extended to custom commands. these are the major changes, there are minor changes that are too numerous to mention here. hopeful these changes will be welcomed . these are the major changes for v2.8, there will be other v3 features that will be brought into babble, but at a later date. 
    here is a video of some of the new features and improvements (there are bugs still and missing styling )
     
    Self Hosted:
    I had announced that i would be getting rid of self hosted, but that was for v3. I've decided to repeal that decision, and continue to make a self hosted and a chat service version. i will also begin selling the self hosted again when i launch v2.8. self hosted and chat service will continue to be feature parity to each other, so the only difference will be the the user limit.
    New Chat Service Pricing:
    I've lowered the buy in prices for the babble chat service, but have kept the renewal terms the same. 
    New Chat Service Server:
    with v2.8 i will be opening up a new server, the old servers will continue to run for 1 month after v2.8 release and the new server will not be backwards compatible with older versions. there will also only be one server. Europe started out as an experiment to see if i could improve latency, it does improve latency, but the costs of running dual servers is prohibitive. the NA server is a much more powerful machine and handles about 90% of the traffic for the chat service, so the amount of sites on the European server are in the single digits. if the demand is there, i will considering coming out with "European" packages, that cost a bit more, that will have a europe based server. sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.
     
  • Michael
    After long consideration, I will be ending Babble Self Hosted in the near future. It wont happen immediately, I don't have a firm date, but I am looking at the second quarter of 2019 (sometime between march and end of may, probably closer to the end of may). 
    The reasons i have decided to do this cause the support load for babble self hosted is incredibly high, due to the installation requirements, the amount of self host clients who have moved to the chat service, the general decline in sales for self hosted in favor of the chat service. Basically the chat service has more or less killed it off. 
    People who have a self hosted purchase and current on their renewals, will continue to be able to download (even after the EOL has been reached). I will try to cancel any outstanding renewals at the time the product is EOL, but you should also check this at that time to avoid being charged for renewals. You will be allowed to run babble self hosted as long as possible, but i will not be providing updates (including bug fixes or new features).
    Any self hosted client who wishes, I can move you over to the chat service now or at the time, I will offer the first 3 months or remainder of your renewal (whichever is the lesser) and after that you will receive an invoice to continue to be on the service, just let me know if you want to do this (as well which package you want, 3/6/1 year terms). 
    in the near future, i will also be offering a different packages for users who will exceed the chat services 100 user, so stay tuned for those.
    Regards,
    Michael 
  • Michael

    Babble v3 Alpha 6

    By Michael, in General,

    lots of fine tuning has gone on this release private rooms and whispers should be working properly now.
    private rooms and whispers will now (or should) send out a notification if you are "offline" (each time you go to babble/switch a room/send a message, your last "online" time changes for babble, if that offline time is older than 15 minutes, you will be considered to be offline and a notification will be sent.).
    i've also made some style changes, dropped the background coloring, left them just to be all "white", you can still style them if you want, but i am going for a min. theme here.
  • Michael
    alpha 2 to 5 have mostly been PHP fixes and work, little to no work has went on on the front end so the things that were broken in the first alpha, remain broken in this alpha. One of the new front end features i've been wanting to bring to babble for awhile, is instead of fixed heights for everything, i wanted dynamic heights for it. so it will responsd to the view port size (well, it will measure from the top of babble itself to the bottom of the view port, and resize everything to 70% of the height of that area, hopefully avoid scroll bars and what not. the chat message area has a min height of 150px, cause i just know there will be one person out there that be on one of those 3 inch cheap af android smartphones from back in 2011 that has resolution of a calculator  ).
    I've also been getting a huge amount of feedback from the IPS forums, mainly cyboman, who has given me a ton of great ideas on how to improve bots and other features in Babble.  so like always if you have a suggestion, this is the best time to make it  
  • Michael

    Babble Version 3 Alpha 1

    By Michael, in General,

    you can now test out an alpha of babble v3. 
    https://codingjungle.com/babble/
    there will be bugs with it, uploads do not currently work (they will upload but they wont attach to the topic) and a lot of the commands are still out of commission, edit/delete don't work (well they sorta do, but its not a permanent thing yet) .
    whispers and private rooms should work without a hitch.
    oh you should also be able to use markdown along with bbc in the editor error, so give that a go if you know markdown. 
    so if you find anything that i haven't mentioned here, please let me know, as i'm pretty sure i got all the features i wanted to add in, now its just shoring everything up and getting some styling going on to finish it off  
  • Michael

    Babble Version 3 Update

    By Michael, in General,

    I know it might seem like version 3 is a pipe dream, but after a lot of debate, thinking and trying to figure out what i was going to do with it, i've began work on version 3.
    Its gonna be different than what i've previously shown for babble version 3, it will have some elements lifted from it.  but here is a list of some features removed and added into version 3:
    Removed:
    Guest Messaging: this was removed cause the code was a bit buggy and was standing in the way of some features i wanted to add in. guest will be able to view the room, but there wont be any settings to allow them to chat. Rooms: well they're not really gone perse, but they act differently. in 2, they were treated as different entities than each other, in 3, they are treated as "channels'. persistent online list: as some of you know the online list has been a bane to my existence for awhile, i had thoughts of removing it completely cause of the issues, but i did a lot of work on it for 2, and have taken what i've learned to 3. in 3, the user list is pulled directly from who is connected at the time when it was connected, in 2 it was a list i tried to maintain and i think that was the problem, trying to keep the list synced.  entry/exit notifications: this wasn't really popular with folks, got a lot of complaints about them, so i've decided to just remove them. New:
    front interface: i really like how the new interface for babble is turning out, it reminds me a lot of chats like slack/discord in the way it functions. new sounds: there will be new sound files, less annoying and softer than the old sounds. whisper history: will show you a list of everyone you have had a conversation with in the past, with showing you their status. Statuses: change your status, if you go idle, automatically sets to away. new bots: there will be several new bots and the way they are configured. Group Chats  
    there will be more news as i finalize the alpha of 3, here is a short video of some of the new features and what version 3 looks like:
    *note: there isn't the final look, as i have minimal styling atm, as i get all the elements built and changes in the codebase.
  • Michael

    PHP 7 and you

    By Michael, in General,

    I'll be upgrading my apps to use improvements found in php 7. the current versions of my apps will remain php 5.6 compatible. I will tag each app with PHP7 when i release them if they will only function on php7+.
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