Shoutbox FAQ's

• Why do I need a shoutbox or tagboard?
Most people use shoutboxes on their personal home pages, blog sites, and community pages. A Shoutbox gives your visitors a chance to let you know they were there and to give you a short message. It also provides a way for your visitors to interact with eachother. Similar to a chat room except that it is easily accessable and viewable by all visitors. Also since "registration" is not required it is used more frequently.


• Why Should I Upgrade?
When you upgrade you unlock several features for your shoutbox or tagboard. See our shoutbox features page for better explaination of the differance between an upgraded shoutbox and free shoutbox.


• How flexable is the shoutbox or tagboard to change colors?
You can change the backgound, text color, link color, input color, alternating row background, smilie color set, scrollbar colors (for IE), and more. The interface is very user friendly so you can setup your colors just the way you want them before inserting the shoutbox into your website.


• How can I insert the shoutbox into my website?
Once you register or login in you will be able to retrieve your html code anytime. You will be given 3 options to insert you code and the code for each one.


• Can I integrade the shoutbox into my messageboard or other user system?
Yes, you can do this, however some customization on your part needs to take place. Our shoutbox will take a user varaiable. It would be your responsability, to supply that variable to your shoutbox html code. For example: the line that calls your shoutbox looks something like this: http://www.hotshout.com/top.php?id=xxx. You can add to this string by insterting a "u" variable of the username. As long as it stays within URL string rules you should be fine. The final string would then look like this: http://www.hotshout.com/top.php?id=xxx&u=myusername. You will probably need to code it with the variable from your application for the username.