Broadcast Message from Client System

Hello all,

I’m new to Openfire, and I just got it running and setup with several Spark clients as a test. The reason I started looking at Openfire and Spark was because I saw that aside from being very practical as an Internal-Only IM system, it also has Broadcast capabilities.

One thing that I need, however, is a simplified way of sending broadcast messages. What I was envisioning was something like a Perl script that could send a broadcast message on behalf of the user (username, password, and message could be hard-coded). I found several different threads on this site (http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/message/133091 and http://www.igniterealtime.org/community/docs/DOC-1121), however I can’t seem to get either to work. After adjusting the required variables, I simply get a Cookie error, and it shows the expiry date as being 01-01-1970.

The main reason for this is to have a combination of IM/Panic alert (user can chat normally, but if they very quickly need to get the attention of everyone on the system, they can double-click an icon on their desktop and the message is sent, so that they don’t have to take the time to type it out).

Are there any current solutions that can do what I need? It should be noted that I’m not a programmer, and only have very basic knowledge of Perl, and really none of Java.

Thanks in advance,

Jon Laslow.

Hi Jon,

I did wrote this script some time ago, it should still work. Anyhow only for the Openfire administrator “admin” in a default installation. Normal users can not use it for broadcasts.

A client-side emergency button may be hard to find. One could create an Openfire plugin similar to the registration plugin, so users open a web page which allows to send such a message. While I still wonder if this really makes sense.

Did you try the Broadcast plugin? There users can subscribe and send messages to random-group-name@your-server.

LG

Hi LG,

It looks like my problems have been solved - apparently I changed something else in your Broadcast-v3.pl file when I was configuring it, because I just re-downloaded and tried it again, and it was able to send the message without issue! Now the users can chat normally, and if needed, simply double-click a shortcut on their desktop which sends a customized message (“broadcast-v3.pl Frank needs help!”, or some such thing).

Sorry to bother you with my “noobishness”, and thank you very much for the script!

Hi Jon,

I hope that you know what you are doing. Adding normals users as administrators is something one should not do. And as the password is stored there in plain text makes things even worse.

One should use it locally on the Oepnfire server.

LG

Although security is a concern (as always), steps have been taken to obfuscate the credentials and admin URL. I’m not horribily worried, though, as 98% of the users on this system wouldn’t know how to follow the path in the desktop shortcut back to the perl script, let alone know how to open it and find the username/password.

Thanks for the assistance!