The last couple of days I've been hacking on a small script that lets users use the shoutbox via a jabber/xmpp client.

It's not a real gateway though. It's a simple client that connects to an xmpp conference room as a user. Then it inserts everything written in the room to the shoutbox, and everything written in the shoutbox is sent to the chat room.

If a user has entered their Jabber ID in a profile field and are using that id to chat, the messages will be shown as that user. Otherwise the messages will be entered as the anonymous user, with the JID as the name.

Messages from the shoutbox sent to the chat room will be prepended with the UBB.threads username.

The script requires Python 2.6 and a couple of libraries (MySQLdb and Twisted).

The script can be found here:
http://github.com/ollej/shoutbridge

There's still a few kinks to work out, but it works more or less right now.

This silly little program now also has support for running without direct access to the MySQL database.

This means that the script can run anywhere and just relay info from any shoutbox to a xmpp/jabber conference room. This mode does not however support relaying messages back from the conference room to the shoutbox yet. Since that would require an added script in the UBB.threads installation.

OK, here's an update on this little script...

The script can now run independently of the UBB.threads server. It will read and post messages using a new server-side script. So it will work whether or not you have direct access to the UBB.threads database from where you are running the Shoutbridge software. It is also possible to run the script without UBB.threads as a Jabber/XMPP bot only.

There is also a plugin system added, with a lot of plugins created. This makes it possible to add functionality quite easily without modifying the script itself.

Among the available plugins is a Twitter integration. This means that all messages can be mirrored out to a twitter account. It can also read mentions to the twitter account and insert these into the shoutbox.

I've been chatting via Adium on the Mac to my site quite frequently in the last months. And I think some of the plugins have increased the usage of web chat as well. One of the commands is an "ice breaker", which can ask questions for the visitors to answer.

More info can be found in the readme on the development site:
http://github.com/ollej/shoutbridge