About NextShout
NextShout is an AJAX shoutbox product for the
vBulletin forum software. It was
originally developed in March of 2006 as a custom solution for the website
Anfiniti Network, but
has since evolved and is now being offered commercially at no cost.
Since day one, it was written to offer improved modularization of commands, and to reduce server loads. For example, a template is not evaluated for every chat entry, and BBCode is parsed during the post process, storing a parsed and unparsed copy of each chat. This follows the principle that data storage is much cheaper than processing time.
After then, the system was slowly gaining more features, a bigger one being multiple channel support, and the fine-grained permissions associated with them. However, the biggest feature was a dramatic decrease in the product's bandwidth requirements, in version 2. The shoutbox now only loads data that has changed since the last load. It will only do a complete load the first time, then receive small, incremental pieces of data afterwards. NextShout versions 1.x used over 5 KB on average, for each load, while 2.x only uses around 100-200 bytes, depending on how active the shoutbox is.
NextShout requires at least PHP 5.1.4 to be installed, and vBulletin 3.6.9 or later, though not the 4.x series. It will work with vBulletin's CSRF protection, if available.