Implement chat and chat filter

[altro50]

What needs to be done?

• Implement CMD_CHAT

• Implement a chat filter

• Implement security checks on the chat (Illegal characters, like HTML characters, maybe a strict regex will do the trick?)

• Changeable chat color for sheriffs (Client prevents non-sheriffs from using chat color by blocking when receiving a chat packet from a user that isn't a sheriff, however, maybe HTML will do the trick?)

Maybe try to add HTML to the chat so you can use font color.

[jonastisell]

@zaseth You can already use HTML in the Panfu-chat.

[altro50]

@zaseth The game supports chat color out of the box, but only if sender is a "Sheriff" (Moderator/GameMaster).
I'm implementing this as we speak.

In that case, in game colors would be appropriate to use. Get some API for swears and simple regex in Java would do the trick.

[altro50]

Last up on the list is "Implement a chat filter".
I'm thinking about just implementing the same interpreter as I did on the InformationServer for the registration.

wordfilter.txt

But for now, I think other things (Like the CMS and CMD_ACTION) have priority.

A good friend of mine is maintaining a repository that fits perfect with your needs on this issue. It contains large amounts of utilities for things like: time, colors, binary streams, 2D stuff and more. In your case, the most usable thing in there is the profanity and string tools, I guess. Another idea that I'd like to suggest is to encrypt packets. I'm currently creating a small but unique algorithm to encrypt & decrypt text with a key. Just check my Github profile sometime this week and you'll see it popping up on my front page if you're interested in the algorithm.

The repo for the utilities by my friend: https://github.com/WeNeedCoffee/CoffeeUtils

[altro50]

@zaseth I'll check out the repo once I've got time for it; As for the crypto, we're limited by the Client.
If we were to implement crypto, we'd have to implement that with the client as well.
(Which means that people would have to modify it themselves, or perhaps we'd have to open-source certain elements of the client?)

I myself have a lot of experience with decompiling and modifying the client, my old project Pandaland for instance, was changed to run on websockets.

The encryption isn't hard at all. It's very compact and made to be easy. It's using random seeds as well (or without if you want to)

[altro50]

@zaseth Not saying that encryption is hard or that implementing it is hard, but we'd have to implement it in the client (Which is written in actionscript), which we'd also have to open-source then.

As of right now, the server works with the unmodified client, and I'd like to keep it that way for now.