AVChat Software Product Blog

Today we’re continuing our series of enhancements to the AVChat IM with a new graph that is now available in the AVChat IM Management Area.

This graph will show you how many users you had browsing the website at any given point in the past month.

The shown data goes back to 30 days so you can easily spot:

• trends in daily usage (most dating sites have high activity during the evening/before bed time)
• trends in weekly usage (lower or higher traffic during weekends)
• increases in site activity (maybe caused by a good referral/link or your own advertising campaign)

It also allows you to zoom in to a specific area (of a few hours for example) and better analyze the evolution of online users across that specific period. Here’s how it looks when you zoom in to a day:

You can easily spot the increase during the afternoon and sharp decrease during late night when everybody goes to sleep.

If you already have an AVChat IM account you can login now in your Management Area and see the new graphs in the Statistics tab for each site.

If you don’t have an AVChat IM account yet you can sign up for one or get a 15 day trial here: http://avchat.im/pricing .

As promised today we’re introducing the AVChat IM Plans and Pricing for the next period.

There will be 3 main plans for now:

1. Lite with basic functionality and up to 40 simultaneous users
2. Professional with video chat and more advanced features and up to 100 simultaneous users
3. Ultimate which includes domain mapping and custom theme development and up to 400 simultaneous users

There’s also the option of doing an enterprise deployment where we put the IM on your own servers together with custom development and custom support.

Full details together with monthly, quarterly and yearly prices are now available on http://avchat.im/pricing .

Hi all,

In the last few weeks we’ve done more than a few silent builds to AVChat IM  fixing many outstanding issues and introducing independent embed codes for each of our IM interface elements.

With so many builds and testing and client feedback behind us we now feel ready to introduce the AVChat IM plans and pricing and launch AVChat IM as a commercial application. That will happen on Thursday 15 of March 2012.

So, come back on Thursday here for the big news .

It’s been a while since the last time we talked about the IM, but we’ve not stopped working on it. We’ve previously made a silent launch (as in: there was no mention f it on our blog) of the new management area (Update 6) and today we’re announcing and launching a host of new changes (Update 7).

The new management area (completely replaced)

We’ve completely replaced the old and dusty IM management area with a new one.

Here’s what’s new in this one:

• Completely new easy to use design
• Dashboard for each website for quick access to the most important information including IM news from this blog
• Settings area with 9 options for fine tuning your IM installation
• Statistics area with a nice line chart that shows you the number of messages sent over the last 30 days (3 more charts are under development)
• Themes area from where you can choose the theme for your IM
• Install area with easy to access plugins for 3rd party CMS systems and embed codes to add the IM to your website

You can login your new IM management area from the AVChat IM website: http://avchat.im/m/clients/ .

Here are a few screenshots to get you excited:

Dashboard

IM Settings

Themes Selection

IM Usage Charts

Changes to the  conversation tab (better and faster)

The conversations tab has suffered a rather drastic overhaul.

• We’re now keeping the clickable area at the bottom so you don;t have to move the mouse when you want to close it after opening it
• We’ve reorganized the information in it on 2 lines instead of 3 for better scanning and reading:
  

  New conversations tab has the information organized on 2 lines

• The focus is now on the last message from the user instead of the user itself
• We’ve also added a cool loading graphic, that shows up while the conversations are loaded:

The new conversations tab now shows a small loading animation

Changes to the embeddable area (separation of functions)

Until now the [send message] button had 2 functions:

1. initiate IM window
2. show status of member (online, offline, idle)

These functions have now been separated and are shown separately:

New embeddable area separates the status information from the [send mesage

In the future we will also separate the embed codes for each element (chat button, status, reply rate and quick message) so that you can put the reply rate under profile pictures and th [send message] button in search results.

Themes support (2 themes, more to come)

Yes, we’ve added themes support today. You can choose between 2 themes at this moment:

• the default grey+green one
• a new blue theme that fits very well with the default Social Engine 4 theme:
  

  Blue theme for Social Engine 4 web sites

You can choose the theme from the new IM management area.

New themes will be added in the future, we might even throw in an Easter or Christmas theme or two!

Much improved IM caching mechanism (faster than ever)

The IM uses quite a bit of java script files, icons and graphics, this means your member’s browsers need to load all of them.

We’ve taken a deep look at how these files are loaded and cached by the browser and server and we’ve made changes to improve the loading times. And they have improved considerably, the conversations tab now shows up almost instantly

All files are now cached by the browser and instead of asking the server if there were any changes the browser just loads them from it’s memory.

This is not the be all and end all of fast IM’s, we still have a few good speed-improoving ideas we want to implement in future builds.

That’s it for now. We’ll continue to improove the IM as long as you keep the feedback comming so please email us at contact@avchathq.com with your thoughts or comment below.

Update: you can discuss the changes in the dedicated forum thread: http://avchathq.com/forum/index.php?/topic/1437-avchat-im-updates-5-and-6-bring-new-management-area-faster-im-and-themes/ .

2 weeks ago we did an update that solved a lot of the issues and bugs that had shown up on IE and other browsers.

Today we’re back in “new features” mode with an update that among others ads the ability to limit the  IM features for each member or member level in particular. This will allow you webmasters out there use the IM as an incentive for free members to upgrade to a paying plan (GOLD Membership for example).

We’re introducing 2 member level limits today with more on the way:

1. Ability to block the reading and sending of text messages

When a member has this limit applied he is not able to

• open the IM window to read his incoming messages
• open the IM window to send text messages to other users.

When such a member:

• clicks the REPLY BUTTON in the Conversations tab
• clicks the SEND IM BUTTON that shows up on member profiles

a Java Script function is called. You can edit that function to add your own UPGRADE message, action or image like we did in the image below:.

Website member being asked to upgrade when clicking the REPLY button.

2. Ability to block initiating video calls

When a member has this limit applied he is not able to initiate video calls. he is able however to receive video calls.

More information about how to enforce these limits is available in your account area on http://avchat.im .

Our AVChat IM integration kits have also been updated expose in the website admin area the ability to turn on/off these features for each user/member level in your website.

The Conversations Tab now contains all messages that have never been replied to

Until now if you sent a message to a user and that user had not replied yet, the one way conversation with that user was not shown in the conversations tab. We’ve just fixed that in this build.

The image above highlights a conversation that holds only one text message sent by me to the other person. These were not shown until now.

We’ve also improved our integration kits

The Joomla!, vldPersonals, Social Engine 3 and 4 and phpFox have all been updated with:

1. New general options:
   • Upgrade URL for when users click on an upgrade link in the IM
   • a way to configure what CHAT image to use for when a user is idle, online or offline (one could have changed these images before this update, right now we’re just exposing the functionality in the admin back end)
     

     General IM Settings for the Social Engine 3 integration kit

2. Ability to allow or not access to some IM features (mentioned at the top) to each user/member level in your website
   

The screenshots above show the new options in the Social Engine 3 integration kit for AVChat IM.

The same options are available for the Social Engine 4, Joomla! and vldPersonals integration kits.

2 weeks ago (Monday 21 November) we did a silent update (update 4) to AVChat IM, here’s what we added at the time:

• You are now notified in the IM window when the other person leaves or enters the room (you can only video chat with someone if he is in the room with you):
  
• New “Don’t tell your password…” message in the IM window:
  
• A camera icon shows up in the CHAT NOW button, in the Conversations Tab and in the IM window besides people who have a web cam:
  
• First branched build, your website members will now get the latest IM right away without the need for their browser cache to expire
• Many user interface bugs fixed, especially on Internet Explorer

If it’s one thing we heard again again from webmasters using AVChat IM is that they need video chat, and last week we finally delivered that feature the third AVChat IM update which went live last week.

All about the new video chat feature

We’ve tried to make the video chat as seamless and as simple as possible:

• There’s a new Video Call button which enables itself only when both persons are in the room.  Clicking it brings up the video windows interface and reduces the text chat area.
• We’ve positioned the video windows in perspective as to give the impression that the 2 persons having a call are opposite of each other.
• The video chat is peer to peer so that the latency is as low as possible.
• We made sure the video chat works as expected when someone refreshes the IM window

What’s next

As you can see a lot of thought has gone into this feature and we’re not stopping here, we already have a huge list of improvements for the video chat feature that we will implement in the next builds. Things like full screen video chat, being notified about when a user comes in the room, improved echo cancellation and more.

How to update your AVChat IM

Existing webmasters running AVChat IM on their websites don’t have to do anything. The video chat feature should already have shown in their IM windows.

Webmasters who are new to AVChat IM and want to install it on their websites need to follow these the steps:

1. Sign up for an account on http://avchat.im/m/c…ts/registratio
2. Verify your email address
3. Sign in http://avchat.im/m/clients/login with your email/password.
4. Add the website you want to use the IM on to your account on http://avchat.im
5. Download and install the provided Modules/Components or use the custom embed codes.

It’s been a week since our last IM update and today we’re bringing a new one. This week is all about increasing the number of messages sent trough the IM. Most of what we’ve done is some way or another relates to increasing that number.

So here’s what’s new:

1. Send quick message area

This area shows below the CHAT NOW buttons and allows a user to send another user a message without opening the IM window. We hope that by making it really easy for users to send each other messages the # of messages sent on a website will increase.

2. More pronounced Conversation tab

The Conversation tab has suffered a few canges:

• • We changed the colors a little bit to add more contrast
  • The number of new messages now show up on top of it with a red background breaking the square grey area
  • We’ve moved the REPLY button all the way to the right to be more visible
  • We’ve moved the status dot to the right of the username to be more consistent with the way it is shown in the text chat window
  • We added a green online spot
  • We’ve added a different color for when the mouse hovers over it
  • A new DELETE COVERSATION button

All these changes will bring more eyeballs to the Conversations tab and hopefully more messages will be sent trough it.

3. We added a way to delete entire conversations.

Conversations can now be deleted from the Conversations tab. Knowing that every discussion can be erased with a sponge will hopefully make it easier for some members to start those naughty conversations they always wanted to do.

4. Other changes include various icons and formatting changes for consistency and a 50%  smaller Reply Rate bar that will now fit into all sort of places.

How to update:

We’ve just pushed the update to our live/production servers and you should see it right away on your website automatically. You don’t have to update your integration code or reinstall or anything.

What’s next:

We’re preparing a  new build focused on adding audio and video chat capabilities.

This is it, please send us feedback!

For any questions or feedback please email us at contact@avchat.im or post in the forum .

It’s been a month since we’ve launched AVChat IM 2.0 as a closed beta and over 2 weeks since we’ve opened it to anyone

Today we’re proud to release the first update to AVChat IM which brings a few rather critical improvements.

Here’s what’s new:

• Improved functionality across firewalls and proxy servers. We had a few cases in the last few weeks where users could not receive and/or send text messages. These issues have now been solved.
• Different look for the conversations tab when you have no conversations (we’ve also added a shadow around it)
  
• The conversations tab now shows up even if you are not logged in
  
• Works properly on Safari on Mac.
• Improved speed with which the CHAT button shows up on people’s profiles
• Turkish language now available
• The conversations tab remains open  between pages and visits, we’re using a cookie to save its state.
• Improved text chat area with new HIDE TEXT CHAT HISTORY button,  LAST MESSAGE RECEIVED display and no more avatar images taking up all the space.
• You will be notified in the text chat when someone goes online, offline or idle.

How to update:

We’ve just pushed the update to our live/production servers and you should see it right away on your website automatically. You don’t have to update your integration code or reinstall or anything.

What’s next:

We’re preparing 2 new builds:

• one will be focused on increasing the discussions/messages between users,
• the other one will be focused on adding audio and video chat capabilities.

This is it, we’d love to get your feedback,

For any questions or feedback please email us at contact@avchat.im or post in the forum .

Anyone with a website can now sign up to use the IM on their website. After a few weeks of testing and running it on a few hundreds websites (closed beta) we’ve decided the new IM is mature enough for everyone to use.

Steps to use the IM on your website:

1. Sign up for an account on http://avchat.im/m/clients/registration
2. Verify your email address
3. Sign in http://avchat.im/m/clients/login with your email/password.
4. Add the website you want to use the IM on
5. Download and install the provided Modules/Components or use the custom embed codes.

As of today we provide free pre-made integration kits for:

• SocialEngine 3 and 4
• Joomla! 1.5/1.6/1.7+ JomSocial or Community Builder
• vldPersonals 2.5.6/2.5.7/2.6
• phpFox 2

There is also a custom embed code that can be used on any other website.

If you have any issues or questions post in the forum or email contact@avchat.im .