A shoutbox, saybox, tagboard, chatterbox or chat box is a

chat Chat or chats may refer to: Communication * Conversation, particularly casual * Online chat, text message communication over the Internet in real-time * Synchronous conferencing, a formal term for online chat * SMS chat, a form of text messagin ...

-like feature of some

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google Search, Google, Facebook, Amaz ...

s that allows people to quickly leave messages on the website, generally without any form of

user registration A registered user is a user of a website, program, or other systems who has previously ''registered.'' Registered users normally provide some sort of credentials (such as a username or e-mail address, and a password) to the system in order to ...

. In their simplest form, shoutboxes are simply lists of short messages, possibly with information about their authors. The page may be automatically refreshed after a certain interval, or polled dynamically in order to keep new messages visible. Older posts are often deleted after a certain number of messages have been written in order to preserve space on the server.

Technology

Shoutboxes are embedded into a page with inline frames or JavaScript. Many Internet forum and web

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

software packages can be modified to add shoutboxes in sidebars on site pages. Shoutboxes are usually maintained in a manner similar to that of more complex

boards Board or Boards may refer to: Flat surface * Lumber, or other rigid material, milled or sawn flat ** Plank (wood) ** Cutting board ** Sounding board, of a musical instrument * Cardboard (paper product) * Paperboard * Fiberboard ** Hardboard, a t ...

, with moderators that can delete posts and ban usernames or IP addresses. Occasionally, features such as impostor identification, flood control, and profanity filters may be included. Like most dynamic content, shoutboxes typically interface with a database, and some may query the database every time a page is requested. Unlike most dynamic content, however, shoutboxes are generally placed on every page of a web site, so they tend to cause disproportionate strain on databases. Therefore, care must be taken to ensure that shoutboxes do not use too many database resources. Caching systems like

memcached Memcached (pronounced variously ''mem-cash-dee'' or ''mem-cashed'') is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of t ...

can be used to mitigate this to some extent, or an alternative implementation such as storing all messages in system-wide shared memory rather than a database may be used. Alternatively, a shoutbox may be loaded from a

flat file A flat-file database is a database stored in a file called a flat file. Records follow a uniform format, and there are no structures for indexing or recognizing relationships between records. The file is simple. A flat file can be a plain ...

References

Groupware Online chat Social information processing {{web-stub

Technology

See also

References