More Secure Private Rooms and Push to Talk in the New AVChat June build 1572

Hello all,

Hope you had a great  May month. We have some new exciting features that we’ve developed for you for the June build.We’ve also tried,  with this build,  to release one the most stable builds so we’ve fixed allot of bugs and i want to take this opportunity to thank our clients that tested the beta version and gave us great feedback.

The key feature in this build is the improved mechanism that creates private rooms (password protected) and allows users to join them. Let’s say that with the new mechanism you won’t have to worry that hackers can read your private conversations.

Let’s see what else is  new in this build:

• Push to Talk: the “push to talk”  button appears when you  turn off the Mic. When you press this button you will transmit audio data  until you release it. While released you will not transmit any audio. This will help with preventing echo in rooms.
  
• Safety checks for CSS in case you delete or misspell some of the lines inside style.css
• When you create a room the name is limited to 50 chars now, this will prevent spammers from creating rooms with very large names.
• The external users list also contains the users that are logged in the chat but they’re not in a room (this will give  you a better picture of who’s in the chat)
• We’ve automated the version check for Flash Player using swfobject to assure that your clients have the right version (this also includes a check for iOS platforms which paves the way for making a iOS chat  client in the future)
• You can now see who kicked who in text chat area
• There is a security reinforcement for Wowza and FMS through adminSwfFileName option. This works well in countries were there are few fixed IPs like Brazil.
• The background options have been moved to style.css. All looks & feel options have to be in the same unified CSS file, this will enable us to provide themes in the future by just creating new CSS files.
• We’ve implemented a mechanism to assure that your clients that connect to the media server have the right swf version/build (clients that have older versions cached will not be allowed to connect, instead an error message will appear telling them to clear cache). This will prevent the errors caused by users having cached old versions of the swf file when doing an AVChat update. You can disable this check (although we do not recommend it) trough the new synchronizeRevisionNumber setting in settings.asc on FMIS and avchat3.properties on Red5 and Wowza.
  
• A way to remove the IPs that were sent with every text message ( this was the last place were the IPs could be seen without having control on them). The option is server side and it’s called includeIPSInTextChatMessages, you can find it in settings.asc on FMIS and avchat3.properties on Wowza and Red5.
  
• You can route  the Open Profile and Send Gift actions to a JS API , the JS  functions called are onSendGift and onViewProfile and you can view them in index.html .
• Admins can now stop the streams of other users
  

As I was saying earlier we’ve also focused on fixing the known problems so that your clients can enjoy the AVChat experience properly.

Here’s a list with some of the fixes in this build:

• admin can still view private cams when he is not allowed fix
• send files to private rooms fixed
• private streams  related fixes
• sendFileToUserEnabled ==2 behaviour fixed
• issues with MIC/CAM checkboxes fixed
• fixed the way that links starting with www were interpreted
• fixed issue with the rotating text messages mechanism inserting white space when receiving an empty string

How to get the new build:

The new build is available in your private client areas.

This build is not available yet to trial users.

How to upgrade an existing build:

You need to overwrite your existing AVChat files (both client side and server side) and DELETE ALL THE PERSISTENCE FILES (SHARED OBJECTS) RELATED TO ROOMS (eg: r1textchat, roomlist).

Forum thread:

There’s a forum thread regarding this build available here:http://avchathq.com/forum/index.php?/topic/1637-new-june-build-1572/