Chat and the TOS

[Martinulus]

I've got a small question about the Terms of Service. The forum contains numerous references to a provision in the Terms of Service that explicitly prohibits the hosting of chatboxes. When I check the TOS however, it doesn't contain such mention, or not anymore.

Is hosting a chatbox still implicitly prohibited by the TOS or can I in fact use such scripts? I would be grateful for the clarification.

[Livewire]

It's no longer against the TOS as of a bit earlier this year. You're still at risk of High Resource Usage suspensions if it were to use a lot of cpu/ram, but those aren't permanent suspensions, so you'd be able to request unsuspension through the account panel and then repair/remove the script in question

[Martinulus]

As a followup question, is there any indication as to how intensively the script can be used before it offends against the (very reasonable) fair resource usage policy?

I do not intend for the chatbox (AJAX Chat, if you guys know a more resource-friendly alternative that offers multiple channels, I'd be grateful for the suggestion) to be used by more than, say, 10 users at any time, and that's a liberal estimate.

[Livewire]

There's not normally ways to gauge it sadly; the easy way is how long it takes to load the page. If it loads very quickly it probably won't trip HRU which based on CPU and RAM - in the case of CPU a lot of scripts actually exceed the maximum, but part of CPU is that it has to be doing so for longer than 15-30 seconds - if the ajax chat takes a long while to load, it'll probably trip HRU eventually.

TBH, about all I can suggest is to try one and see how it rolls - if all else fails, pick up a web-based IRC client, find a good IRC server, and have it connect to that IRC server instead - this would actually offload all the chatting to a third party IRC server and use 0 resources on the site anyways