Most likely the work involved with this is much more than the benefits but what the heck, I'll put it out there.
I have been with CMS systems for A LONG time. The one I miss even today, was an ASP platform known as SoopPortal.
Believe it or not, this thing is still around, but I have long left it in the dust and moved onto vBulletin.
However, one of the developers of this portal system made a chatbox my past members absolutely loved and I have yet to find one for VB that does what this one did.
1. It was a sidebox chat. I really dislike the full 100% chatboxes getting released on vb.org...
2. It had an alert sound. VB had a plugin MCG Chat that incorporated sound, but it has fallen into the 4.0 upgrade grave and the developer quit (yeah I bought it).
3. Smilies... Some chat boxes either do not have, or do not support the using of emotes/smilies of the site...
So...
Along comes ArrowChat and having been a customer of CometChat (been), I have an idea how this chat will function cosmetically...
While I am very happy with the fact Arrowchat will have alerts and sounds for incoming chats and ArrowChat will fit nicely into the footer
of all the pages on my VB site without the huge gapping hole most chatboxes make....
But there is that one minor issue my users often bring up... What about the sidebox (general) chat box?
So I am now curious how difficult it would be to incorporate this idea (if not already in the works).
I envision a widget for VB or some sort of external js call a site owner could pull in.
This js would allow users to chat from an open lobby style chat.
Because it was a js call, the developer could put it in a widget, sideblock, VBAdanced module or some other area to suit their specific needs.
Then, and I know this would cause all kinds of issues for different integrations, but the use of the integrated site's emotes/smilies in the chats would be very nice.
Just thought I'd throw my line out there to see if I got any bites... :-)