Question

I am building a chat feature inside a website, something like stackoverflow chat but simpler, are there any best practices or standards I need to follow while creating this feature using MVC .net and javascript? are there any articles documents or books talked about this in details?

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert, but I’ll do my best. If someone thinks this would better serve as a community wiki, I’ll change it to such, just let me know.

As I see it, there are two general fields of chat services:

Chat Rooms (Like IRC)

• Needs some sort of moderation hierarchy
• Somewhat less need for privacy in the communication
  • as a note: you may want to have both private and public chat rooms,
    in which case, privacy may become more of an issue
• Minimal need for user registration
  • The only reasons you may need user registration in this case is for
    moderation or privacy reasons
  • Like is often done on IRC networks, I’d make user registration
    optional

One-on-One Chat (Like XMPP)

• Typically needs encryption on all sides
• Privacy is key
• Authentication is very important (Unless you’re doing a chat-roulette
  type thing)
• Moderation needs are minimal
  • About the only moderation tools you’ll need are something to prevent
    spam (which can be solved by simply not revealing user lists, and
    requiring users to approve of someone before that person can chat
    with them), and something to allow users to block other users

---

Okay, so now that we’ve figured out what type of service you want to
implement, we have to figure out the “how”.

Pre-existing Standards

• There’s lots of code out there, but…
• Typically the standards are more complex than something you could roll
  yourself
  • The clear exception here is IRC, which is drop-dead simple to
    understand, although may actually be somewhat lacking in features
    for what you want to do
  • May contain extra things that you don’t care about (such as file-transfers
    in XMPP)
    • That doesn’t mean you actually have to support them, but it’s more pages
      of rfc documents that you have to look through

Rolling Your Own Protocol

• Potentially insecure, as you may not know what to look out for
• Potentially lower up-front costs, higher long-term costs
  • What I mean by this is simply that when you roll it yourself, you save the
    time of having to look through a bunch of standards, but as a result, you
    may end up building a less robust system than you hoped
• More easily customizable for your needs (granted you don’t mess things up,
  see previous point)

---

Some Other Odds-and-Ends

• You may want to make bots
  • Be careful about opening up an API for others to make bots though. This
    could be good or bad, depending on your community. People could use it for
    spam, or for great things. With great power comes great responsibility.
• It’s possible to combine both a chatroom system and a one-to-one chat. IRC
  supports one-to-one chats, and XMPP supports chatrooms.