We have been hard at work this summer and listened to our client’s requests as usually and added the feature to report users among with a lot of other improvements that include new options for room moderators, a more polished interface and lots more.

Report User Feature

Sending a report

An AVChat user can now report any other user if necessary. This option is easily accessed by pressing the Report this user button located in a user’s side menu.

The same option can also be accessed directly from the user’s web-cam window.

Once pressed a window opens that allows the following:

• Selecting a report reason
• Adding more information regarding the report in the limit of 200 characters.

Pressing Report will send the report, Cancel will cancel the sending.

Upon sending the report, automatically, two screenshots are taken:

• A screenshot of the text-chat area
• A screenshot of the reported user’s web-cam

These screenshots are sent to the web-server and can be found in the AVChat installation directory in the folder named report_snaps. The file-name is composed of the user’s siteId and the screenshot type (CAM or TEXT), so a screenshot will be named like so: userSitedId_CAM.jpg and userSitedId_TEXT.jpg.

All of the information of the report is also available through a PHP API, the file sendReport.php. This file can be configured to send an automatic email with the data of the reported user along with links to the two above mentioned screenshots. By default the code for the email sending is commented. It can also be customized to be used in any other way it is seen fit.
Important: The email address will have to be set manually, by opening the file with any text editor and editing the following line of code:
$to = “webmaster@example.com”;
The default mail that it is sent will look similar to this:

Viewing a report

All of the reports can be seen using the AVChat administrator area -> Reports panel. The number between the parentheses is a notification for the total number of reports.

The notifications work in the following way:

The first time the admin area is entered, the total number of reports are shown. If a new report is sent and the admin is logged in only the number of new reports will be shown with a “+” sign in front like so: Reports (+10).

When the Reports button is pressed a new window will pop-up and the notifications for the number of reports is reset as it is considered that you have viewed any potential new reports.
The window displays all of the reports sent. Here you have the following options:

• View the camera snapshot for a particular report
• View the text-chat snapshot for a particular report
• Remove a report

For good practice and accurate notifications it is good that any solved report is removed.

Removing a report will permanently delete it.

Additionally the report feature can be disabled by setting enableReportSending to 0. Also an admin can be blocked to see the reports by setting adminCanSeeReports to 0. By default they are both enabled (set to 1).

Here are other new features added:

For the desktop client

1. Moderators can now promote other users to room moderators by simply pressing the Promote to moderator of this room option in the user’s side menu. After this the respective user is automatically removed from the room and asked to re-enter in order to gain moderator options through a notification.
   Additionally this specific option can disabled by setting moderatorsCanPromote to 0. By default this comes enabled.
2. The chat history window can now load a specific number of messages from the room text-chat.
   This is controlled by the setting setChatHistoryLength, which by default is set to 250 max messages. Increasing this value to a large number can cause delays when entering/switching the room if that specific room contains a large number of messages. It is recommended not to be set to anything larger than 350.
3. Added to new tags in the audio-video profiles: othersDisplayWidth and othersDisplayHeight. These two tags control the height and width of the stream when shown to the viewer. !Important: Replace all the old audio-video profiles with the new ones from the archive. Not doing so will cause stream broadcasting issues.
   
4. The rotating messages script now also returns the userSiteId and the roomId in which that user is in. This is all relative to the AVChat client instance that is making the call. This way different messages can be assigned to different users, and for different rooms.
5. AVChat is now delivered with a default sendGift.php API.
6. Now AVChat will correctly inform you if the client is newer or older than the app installed in the media server. We often run into this situation because of browser/CDN/server side caches
7. The moderator icon can now be changed by simply replacing the default one that comes in the build archive.
8. New X close buttons for all the windows.

For the mobile client

• New specific setting showMobileChatHistory allows the enabling/disabling of the chat history shown by the mobile version of AVChat.

Issues that have been fixed:

1. The settings hiddenGenderEnabled and adminGenderEnabled now correctly affect the displaying of the respective genders.
2. Fixed issue with room management issues sometimes crashing when no rooms where created.
3. Fixed issue with the login screen not being properly removed after the chat has been entered.
4. Fixed issue with not all windows having shadows if windowsCastShadows was set to true in style.xml.
5. Fixed issue with the bad-words mechanism  not filtering chinese and russian characters.
6. Fixed issue  that displayed a black border between the rooms tab and the text-chat area upon re-sizing the window.
7. Fixed issue with the tooltips arrow being distorted if the tooltips were shown to the right.

How to download and upgrade:

You can download this new build of AVChat from your client private webpage.

Steps to upgrade the old installation:

1. overwrite all old client side files (including the language file because new translations have been added, and the audio-video profiles that have also been modified).
2. overwrite the media server files and restart the media server.

If you have issues with it after upgrading make sure you clear your browser’s cache. If you still have issues after doing that send us an email at support@nusofthq.com

If you want us to upgrade your AVChat installation for you can purchase our additional AVChat Installation Service from here: http://avchat.net/buy-now#services .  Once you make the purchase just email us at contact@nusofthq.com.