As for the communication without IRC or Jabber, how do you expect this to work? How would you let someone else know that you want to chat with this person. There is the possibility which has been discussed before to use the green report bar for notifications in general which would allow you to communicate with a sepecific user through the user session. But this still has to be developed and I'm not even sure it suits the UI well.

As for HTML/Javascript based chat systems, they suck (personal opinion). But this might be a reason why noone has stood up to the challange and port the chat module to 5.1 or 5.2.

I've corrected the permission on the image :)

yes we can see who's online but only the members; not the guest (I guess most members started as guest first). There's some thread in the forum discussing this. but without a solution.

I wasn't thinking about a one-on-one chat but more a kind of simple public chat box. Here's an example:

http://www.goldberg.be/tools/file-storage/view/chatbox.bmp

or we could call it a guestbook. Maybe simply adding a form to post directly in one forum and displaying the few last posts (like on oacs main page) will do it.

what do you think?

Yves.

Nevertheless, the installation requirements are still not "automatic" as with other packages ...