According to this old news announcement: "Following on the development of Guild Chat for Station Players our engineers have been working to provide other means by which players can communicate with each other when offline. We have compiled some documents to help educate people that may wish to communicate with our chat infrastructure via their own programs or third party plugins." Following this announcement are links to documents with instructions on how to configure third party applications to connect to the main chat server; however, since the "upgrades" to the eq2players.com site were completed, these links (and many, many others) seem no longer to work. Does anyone have copies of or can reproduce instructions on configuration of Jabber clients to connect to chat servers? I'd love to hook Trillian up. I can connect to the Jabber server at eq2players.station.sony.com, but I can't seem to authenticate / stay connected.
[p]Mate, you're confusing the issue here....[/p][p]The official "Let's ***** about guild chat not working" thread is over here:[/p][p]http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?start=15&topic_id=352333[/p][p]:thumbup:[/p][p] [/p]
I'm not talking about the "web chat feature" discussed in that thread. I'm talking about connecting to the Jabber server "guildschat.station.sony.com" - different issue entirely =)
[p]Yeah, well, once you see what's required to connect a "real" Jabber client to what SoE did to theirs, your complaints may converge.[/p][p]AFAIK, there's no good way to connect to the SoE Jabber server. If you've used Trillian to do it, you've probably already experienced one of the better ways of doing it. And that still requires typing in server addresses and conference names by hand, connecting, selecting the character, disconnecting, and then reconnecting again before you can even start chatting. And then having the server or client die on you unexpectedly.[/p][p]I tried it. On a client that was properly specced, it was faster to log into the game than go through the convolutions to log into Jabber with a Jabber client. On my laptop, it was faster to log in with Trillian, but less frustrating to just load the game.[/p][p]I haven't found a client that is able to automate the process of signing in to the SoE Jabber servers, or that works any better than Trillian (I'm sure there are other, free alternatives, I just happened to have Trillian handy when I first looked into trying to do it). I would suspect, like pretty much everything else SoE is doing with their Web services, that their Jabber server isn't really Jabber-standards-compliant at all, but something that's been bent severely out of true in order to get it working [strike]with the game[/strike], and it's likely to be unstable when accessed[strike] any other way[/strike]. Based on their lack of support of the other [paid!] features, I think trying to get their attention on this will be [strike]at best an uphill battle[/strike] futile. [/p]
[p]I'm not sure if the Jabber access is actually supported anymore... They made a big to-do about it when they released it, and then it quietly seemed to drop off the face of the planet.[/p][p]Have you tried C&Ping those old broken links into the Wayback Machine? You may get some results. [/p]
The wayback engine did not work on those links, but still a neat idea. I finally pieced together protocol snippets, Ethereal output, and some rather cryptic references to get Miranda to connect and join the guild chat "conference". When I have some time I'll post a walkthrough of how I did it so no one else has to go through this crap. Incidentally, you're absolutely correct - the gyrations that you have to go through to connect to guild chat are completely insane. While the augmentations Sony made to the Jabber protocol are not illegal (at least if I'm reading the Ethereal capture correctly), it would be nice if those augmentations were "natively" supported by an_integrated_chat_client_01.
Yup, the external chat server is still there and functioning. My guildchat bot is still parsing and perusing and storing away item links and messages for people. Its absolutely heinous from a 3rd party chat client perspective, but once I got everything all coded up... *shrug* As long as the servers are working (and there's be significant spans of time where they haven't been) all is well in mudville. And before anyone asks, yes he's EULA compliant as he's merely a disembodied talking spirit. He can't do anything inside the game except spam guildchat ;-)
