BlaB! chat News

2024-Oct-25 (24.10: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

New modern and gentler default sounds (need to be downloaded separately if you upgrade from a previous version)
Users are reminded of their username when resetting the password for both - mail and answer resets
blabws-server and blabws-server-pro version 24.10 are now available
Blab! WS Pro: Cloudflare TURN servers can be used for smooth voice & video chat experience
WS Pro/AX Pro: a new cost-effective ChatGPT gpt-4o-mini model is included, which is 3 times cheaper and much better than the previous gpt-3.5-turbo
WS Pro/AX Pro: SuperAdmin can delete any visible messages from chat directly!
WS Pro/AX Pro: highlight.js updated to the latest version
WS Pro/AX Pro: leaflet.js updated to the latest version

2024-Jul-23 (24.07: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Updated translations
Only SuperAdmin can read PMs and offline PMs
Automatically reconnects and displays the latest messages if the websocket connection is lost due to the tab not being visible or screen locked on mobile
Automatically displays previous messages if room ID is specified in the URL (?room=34)
Pro only: You can select ChatGPT-4o as the AI subsystem of TheGodFather along with ChatGPT 4.0 and ChatGPT 3.5-turbo
Pro only: All downloadable splash page templates are now with loading animations instead of low-res images
Pro only: 8 new splash page templates and a new preview & download page

More info on what you can do with a splash page can be found in the documentation

2024-Apr-21 (24.04: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor changes, bugfixes and updates
Self-Delete & Forget sequence can be initiated with a button from PANELS » Profile (or PANELS » Settings if the chat is integrated with a forum/CMS)
AX/WS Pro only: Custom text for Self-Delete & Forget and an option to disable it entirely
AX/WS Pro only: Facebook Login is now deprecated!

Facebook's recent requirement for app owners to prove with documentation that they own a legal business in their country of residence has led us to discontinue the "Login with Facebook" feature. It will continue to work until some change by FB breaks it. If you have users who are actively using it, we recommend you to setup a welcome message with instructions on how to self delete and forget, then create a normal password protected account using the same username.

2024-Jan-03 (24.01: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Youtube Shorts, Instagram Reels & TikTok videos inline in chat
https://twitch.tv and https://dailymotion.com alternative media URLs are now recognized
Ip2Country user info using iplocate.io API calls if other options are not available
MediaHelper TGF extension - posts in chat playable attachment when supported media URL is found in a message: youtube, vimeo, reels, tiktok, dailymotion, twitch, soundcloud, mixcloud
9gag TGF extension - posts in chat image & video memes from https://9gag.com
Cartoonize TGF extension - cartoonize existing user avatars with AI: ChatGPT4 & Dall-E
DALLE TGF extension - ask Dall-E to draw a picture based on text input

Cartoonize user avatars with AI - JANUARY 2024!

2023-Nov-30 (23.11: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor changes and bugfixes
New darker default style
Auto-kick on server side on flooding with adjustable msg/min to trigger (websocket version only)
Better link RegExp to match non-ASCII letters in URLs (umlauts, Cyrillic, Greek etc)
AX/WS Pro only: ChatGPT based on GPT-4 can be selected from ACP (Do not select unless you are a tier 1 user which means you have made at least one $5 payment through platform.openai.com)

2023-Nov-09 (23.10 blabws-server / blabws-server-pro)

v23.10 of blabws-server & blabws-server-pro for linux32/linux64 and arm32 architectures is now available to download. The latest version was built against the latest libraries and supports server-side flood control per user which can be activated with the following param in config.php:

$blabws_server_floo=50;               // Flood control - messages per minute threshold; [1-100] 0 = disabled

2023-Sep-19 (23.09: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

New lines in chat are enabled and can be inserted with Shift+Enter
New lines can be disabled in config.php (previous behavior)
Double-click the text box to expand/collapse
Character count indicator in expanded mode
Different sound notification on mentioning own name (Pro only)
Minor changes and bugfixes

2023-May-14 (23.05: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

AX/WS Pro only: a new YouTube extension to post directly with YT: yt https://youtu.be/nTqG5rsFeJI
AX/WS Pro only: YouTube alternative preview in a movable box
AX/WS Pro only: mentions: @any-name and @my-name appear with different styles
AX/WS Pro only: ChatGPT is now a subsystem of TheGodFather and no longer an extension
AX/WS Pro only: ChatGPT responses can have global and conditional modifiers (be sarcastic, be serious, always answer in French etc) and you can conditionally replace input messages

2023-Mar-14 (23.03: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Some adjustments and minor improvements
High-contrast Day/Night mode per user activated from Panel » Settings + option to disable it for all in ACP
AX/WS Pro only: Native emoji are now default and do not replace emoticons
AX/WS Pro only: Animated emoticons; emo-codes accept common conventions such as :) :( :* :D
AX/WS Pro only: Emoji Tool - create your own animated emoticon set from 900 high quality animated emoticons
AX/WS Pro only: Tenor GIF Search & GIF Machine support both Tenor API v2 & Tenor API v1 (until v1 is deprecated)

2023-Jan-05 (23.01: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor changes and improvements
Fixed inconsistencies in some boxes when custom fonts are used
New high-contrast Night/Day themes in AdminCP
Colored buttons: emoticons, stickers, stimoji & blings
Multi-line message box
AX/WS Pro only: ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence (AI) TGF extension

2022-Oct-27 (22.10: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

All self closing tags removed < /> (required by w3.org)
Refactored PWA app + new icons
AX/WS Pro only: News Machine completely removed, replace with TGF - News
AX/WS Pro only: custom global font from Google CDN (AdminCP - Style - G-Font)
AX/WS Pro only: Percentile dice: 99/99
AX/WS Pro only: Horoscopes TGF extension is now multi-language
AX/WS Pro only: SurpriseMe TGF extension is now multi-language

2022-Sep-23 (22.09 VIP-SHOP)

VIP-SHOP upgraded to version 22.09 in order to match the new Stripe API - 2022-08-01. The previous version of VIP-SHOP is still available in the download center. Do not upgrade if you are still running Stripe API 2020.

2022-Jul-28 (22.07: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

News Machine has been deprecated due to the recent NewsAPI enforcement of their free plan "do not use in production" rule and is to be completely removed in the next release. You can still access the AdminCP part by entering chat/admin.php?q=nbox manually in the address bar of your browser. Remove all subsets and stop all cronjobs that fetch news. Optionally replace with TGF - News.

What's new:

Bugfixes
Several changes to comply with PHP8/9 requirements
AdminCP optimizations
Korean language
All external libs upgraded to the latest version
AX/WS Pro only: changeable curl user agent
AX/WS Pro only: TheGodFather extension - Translate
AX/WS Pro only: TheGodFather extension - SurpriseMe
AX/WS Pro only: TheGodFather extension - News

2022-Apr-14 (22.04: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Arabic and Chinese translations
AX/WS Pro only: as Apple re-enabled MediaRecorder API, now voice and video messages work with Safari 15. However, Safari does not recognize the bitrate parameter which limits the filesize of the recorded video. You may need to reconsider your video messages length. The default settings are tested to work.
WS Pro only: voice and video calls work on all Apple devices (MacOS/IOS) including IOS 15.x

2022-Jan-07 (22.01: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Fixed a bug that allowed visually the same names to be registered
Quarantine system completely removed
AX/AX Pro only: verification via email or SMS on register
AX/WS Pro only: Multiavatars (default on new installations, on upgrade: ACP » Settings » General)
AX/WS Pro only: stopwords - strings that are not posted in chat but can be used as keywords/commands for TheGodFather, GIF Machine and News Machine

2021-Nov-03 (21.11: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor changes
AX/AX Pro only: automatic theme color (Chrome for Android)
AX/WS Pro only: new gag & ban interface in frontend and a new page banned users in AdminCP
AX/WS Pro only: 700 Unicode emoji instead of the SVG emoticons (optional: ACP » Settings » General).
AX/WS Pro only: custom headers

2021-Sep-12 (21.09: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

AX/AX Pro only: Changed behavior when the chat is in an inactive/unloaded tab and in background on mobile.
AX/WS Pro only: SEO Page that serves indexing bots relevant content.
AX/WS Pro only: VIP users (with VIP codes that can be sold online).

2021-Jul-24 (21.07: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

AX/WS Pro only: integration with Flarum
AX/WS Pro only: new message templates - reply and delete own messages (ACP » Style » Message Style)
AX/WS Pro only: extended profiles with education, occupation, interests, about me and a cover image
AX/WS Pro only: new section in ACP » Settings: User & Profile - a profile template and a list of cover images

2021-May-13 (21.05: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Several minor changes
New link replacement REGEX - domain with full URL visible onMouseOver
Badword filter improvement - replace forbidden words with "synonyms": bitсh » lady
AX Pro/WS Pro only: Offline messages & optional offline messages to AdminCP
AX Pro/WS Pro only: Bling Machine - full screen animations, adverts, announcements

Bling Machine

2021-Mar-16 (21.03: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

A number of internal changes
ACP » Settings section split in two: Settings and Additions
Splash page before login/register (splash templates in ACP » Additions » Splash Page)
DND status restricts PM
AX/WS Pro only: image thumbnails are now resized
AX/WS Pro only: doodle thumbnails
AX/WS Pro only: video thumbnails (ffmpeg required)
AX/WS Pro only: all thumbnails are now with icons in the top/left corner

2021-Jan-01 (21.01: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Multiple internal changes incl. minimal usage of cookies
All user settings, options etc moved from cookies to LocalStorage
Avatars in the online list
Support for animated stickers and avatars in webp format
🇦🇱 Albanian and 🇸🇪 Swedish language files
AX Pro/WS Pro only: Landing page with a list of rooms + custom elements
AX Pro/WS Pro only: Optionally force avatar selection on first login
AX Pro/WS Pro only: Chat page re-design
AX Pro/WS Pro only: Thumbnails for voice/video messages (ffmpeg required)
AX Pro/WS Pro only: Online users can be ordered by group or A-z

2020-Oct-26 (20.11: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor changes and improvements
Brand new PWA app for desktop & mobile
Shortcuts in AdminCP
AX Pro/WS Pro only: editable predefined messages triggered with the send button
AX Pro/WS Pro only: quiz games with categories, scores and global score. Quiz datasets featuring 40k questions

Until now Facebook profile photos were considered public data. From October 24, 2020 Facebook requires all requests to their servers to be made with an ACCESS TOKEN. If you use Continue with Facebook you need to upgrade your chat system to v20.11 and provide CLIENT TOKEN in ACP » Settings » General » Facebook Login. CLIENT TOKEN can be found under your Facebook App » Settings » Advanced » Security.

2020-Sep-17 (20.09: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Several minor improvements
AX Pro/WS Pro only: New machine - Aunt Hedwig triggered by IFTTT, Zapier, Microsoft Flow and other automation services delivers in chat tweets, RSS, Facebook posts, news
AX Pro/WS Pro only: TheGodFather extensions - currency, distance & temperature converters, jokes, the Bible (any verse upon request from 5 editions), last.fm, OpenWeather, DuckDuckGo search, Text-to-Speech, Pixabay pictures, Urban, Webster and Wordset dictionaries.
AX Pro/WS Pro only: Places - users sharing their location visible on a world map

2020-Aug-08 (20.08: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Random phrases for the textbox placeholder (ACP - Settings - General)
Spellcheck="true" for textbox; autocomplete="on" for login form
Global cookie change: Optional cookie arguments: HttpOnly; Secure; SameSite;

There is a new cookie requirement already enabled in the latest Chrome and soon to be enabled in Firefox In case you cannot login to chat when running in an iframe from another domain - upgrade to 20.08 and set in config.php:

$cookieparam='SameSite=None; Secure;';

Keep in mind that SameSite=None works with SSL only! More about this: SameSite=None

2020-Jul-14 (BlaB! Pages 20.07)

First release of BlaB! Pages - a simple, easy to understand and easy to use Content Management System to deploy a new website for your BlaB! chat in minutes separating code, UI and content. Supports BlaB! AX / BlaB! AX Pro and BlaB! WS / BlaB! WS Pro: BlaB! Pages

2020-May-07 (20.05: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor bugs and improvements
German language file changes
Custom HTML/JS code on chat page
Removed Chrome web extension
QR-CODE & CHATCODE for our Android apps BlaB! Q / BlaB! G can be created with https only (Android 9+ requirement)
Widgets: who's online, latest visitors, statistics to be displayed on external pages
WS & WS Pro: enter/leave messages in room #1 only or all rooms
AX Pro/WS Pro: new toolbar - voice/video messages, doodle, upload
AX Pro/WS Pro: random news prompt on expired newsID
AX Pro/WS Pro: fixed: newsAPI fetching old news due to improper ordering
AX Pro/WS Pro: fixed: MSIE media.devices bug on asking permissions on load
AX Pro/WS Pro: fixed: max upload label covering button

2020-Mar-15 Corona virus SVG stickers for your chat! Download · Screenshot

2020-Mar-13 (20.03: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Divided sound notifications: New PM / PM
All sounds can be turned on/off individually from Panels - Settings
You can build your own sound notification file from the Admin CP
New settings for fake online users - add, remove and edit individually
On deleting guest users, guests that are set as fake online users are spared
AX/WS Pro only: improvements in voice & video messaging
AX/WS Pro only: optional permission to use camera/microphone on loading the chat page
WS/WS Pro only: optional ping-per-min from the client to prevent Nginx proxy timeout
WS Pro only: peer-2-peer voice and video calls over WebRTC

2020-Jan-18 (20.01: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor changes
AX/WS Pro only: Voice & video messages improvements
AX/WS Pro only: Permission D - selectable set of pages to access in readonly mode
AX/WS Pro only: Location, gender, age in addition to avatar and motto
AX/WS Pro only: TwitchTV - channels & videos

2019-Nov-22 (19.12: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

A security vulnerability fixed
New statistics page in ACP
Optional overwrite REMOTE_ADDR with HTTP_X_REAL_IP in config.php (cloudflare/reverseProxy)
AX/WS Pro only: users can create and vote in polls
AX/WS Pro only: TextStream attachments with backgrounds - jokes, poems, greetings
AX/WS Pro only: DailyMotion videos in chat
AX/WS Pro only: Additional helpers in ACP to post attachments in TimeMachine
AX/WS Pro only: Changes in permissions - shared permission p - avatars and motto, permission q - Polls
AX/WS Pro only: Changes in permissions - shared permission j - external sources and location; permission k - TextStreams

2019-Nov-22
Four days ago Gavin Loughridge reported a security vulnerability that affects all versions of BlaB! AX, BlaB! AX Pro, BlaB! WS (client) and BlaB! WS Pro (client) prior to 19.12 and including v19.11 At the moment there are no exploits in the wild but this is likely to change in the next few weeks/months The bug was fixed yesterday and that's why we are releasing v19.12 in November, a week earlier. You do not need to upgrade immediately as long as you:

MANUALLY CREATE AND SAVE A NEW COOKIE SALT IN ADMIN CP - SETTNGS. THE SALT STRING MUST BE 50 SYMBOLS LONG AND MUST CONTAIN ONLY LOWERCASE LETTERS, UPPERCASE LETTERS AND DIGITS.

CLICK HERE TO GENERATE CRYPTOGRAPHICALLY SAFE SALT

2019-Nov-02 (19.11: blabws-server / blabws-server-pro / BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Bugfix: BlaB! WS/Pro error on loading previous messages
More room background controls: font size and length
AX/WS Pro only: Hidden rooms with group permissions
AX/WS Pro only: Group rules - automatically move users from one group to another
AX/WS Pro only: Images / YouTube thumbnails / Giphy GIFs inline (optionally)
AX/WS Pro only: Changes in permissions - shared permission "o" for stickers+stimoji, permission "x" - pTop content
AX/WS Pro only: mini user profile in ACP on logs, messages, doodles, files with cross links
AX/WS Pro only: TikTok videos

2019-Oct-11 (19.10: blabws-server / blabws-server-pro / BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

blabws-server 19.10 & blabws-server-pro 19.10 for linux32/linux64 and arm32 architectures
Russian and Indonesian translations
Custom text on Login/Register/ForgottenPassword pages
Optional latest messages instead of welcome message
AX/WS Pro only: webm format when recording voice/video messages; optional convert voice and video messages with ffmpeg serverside (ffmpeg required)
AX/WS Pro only: kick with gag for a period of time

2019-Jul-02 (19.07: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor changes & improvements
AX/WS Pro only: ip2hash - IP identifier in profile to recognize chatters using multiple accounts
AX/WS Pro only: ip2country - country code & name in profile (requires Apache/Nginx GeoIP module installed)
AX/WS Pro only: TheGodFather replies fetching data from external URLs (e.g. radio what's playing)
AX/WS Pro only: VPN&Proxy Guard

2019-Jun-03 (19.06: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Minor improvements: scrolling, editable meta referrer
Danish and Romanian language files
PM Log tab in panel
AX/WS Pro only: Custom panel-top block (all tabs) for online radio
AX/WS Pro only: Room and PM transcripts
AX/WS Pro only: GIF Machine

2019-May-03 (19.05: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Turn chat on/off from ACP + off message
Adjustable width/height to crop & resize avatars
Language files: Greek and Hungarian
AX/WS Pro only: Create new users from ACP
AX/WS Pro only: Machines! Time Machine, TheGodFather, News Machine

2019-Apr-01 (19.04: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

UTF8SCAN - no longer mixed alphabets in usernames and numeric only usernames
Firefox scroll issue fixed
JavaScript optimizations
Sticker cache increased and can keep up to 15000 stickers
Uploaded avatars are cropped and resized
Cronjobs to maintain the database: auto-delete messages, guests, files, doodles
Badwords filter
Different background images on login/register pages and in main chat
AX/WS Pro only: Facebook profile picture as avatar

2019-Mar-01 (19.03: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

New language files - Italiano and Polski
Admin CP improvements
Typed but unsent messages remembered per room/user
WS only: lsof no longer required to start/stop server
AX/WS Pro only: Facebook Login

2019-Jan-02 (19.01: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

New language files - Português-BR, Čeština, Nederlands, Türkçe
Minor improvements
AX/WS Pro only: voice and video messages

2018-Nov-07 (18.11: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Ignored (muted) users are remembered between sessions
WS only: Enter/Leave messages are now optional
AX/WS Pro only: an option to add entries in the ACP menu in order to switch between channel ACPs easily

2018-Aug-16 (18.08: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Styles can be exported/imported from ACP
CTRL+SHIFT+1-9 activates rooms 1-9
CTRL+SHIFT+L/R arrows cycles through rooms
Minor improvements in ACP
AX/WS Pro only: Stimoji (Sticker Emojis) - 1000+ stickers with a searchable index
AX/WS Pro only: Updated Vanilla integration

2018-Jul-08 (18.07: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Room history and PM history in chat and in ACP
Options to adjust font and opacity of room backgrounds
New GDPR notice templates
Message templates incl. messages with avatars
Database default collation changed to utf8mb4
AX/WS Pro only: Optional Tenor GIFs
AX/WS Pro only: Guest and registered users in different groups
AX/WS Pro only: URLs to site profiles when integrated with another system

2018-May-21 (blabws-server / blabws-server-pro)

We now provide blabws-server and blabws-server-pro for ARM7 processors (Raspberry Pi 1/2/3 and similar boards).

2018-May-15 (18.05: BlaB! AX / BlaB! WS / BlaB! AX Pro / BlaB! WS Pro)

Improved German translation
Minor interface changes
Drag-2-scroll and wheel-2-scroll can be turned on/off from ACP
BlaB! Q and BlaB! G Android apps updated on Google Play Store
AX/WS Pro only: - doodle, share and play doodles in chat, doodle on images

Page updated: 2024-10-25