What will happen to my web pages and chat box if chat is down?

A chat outage will have no impact on your web pages other than your chat service will be offline.  

Chat snippets are designed to load the chat code asynchronously, even in old browsers that don't provide direct support for asynchronous loading.  (We have our ways...  well, actually, we copied Google's ways, but they work and that's the important thing.)  There is no risk of your page hanging or failing to load, even if our servers are completely unavailable (which is only about 0.04% of the time). If you prefer to code your pages by hand rather than using the chat snippets from the chat snippet management page, no problem. Just use our example code, since it also includes the asynchronously-loading javascript and also should not cause performance problems on your pages.

Long-term user, deployed older-style code?

If you are a long-term user of chat, you have likely deployed older-style code on your pages that does not include the newer asynchronous javascript. In that case, the best thing to do is update your code.

In addition to the asynchronous loading described above, our new-style code, as generated in the admin dashboard's chat snippet management page, also stores the details of your chat service (chat box skin, queue, offline behavior) on our server, centrally, instead of on your actual web page. If the central code storage is of interest, it's worth switching over the full code block you're using now to the newer-style snippets.

If you are not interested in the central code storage, your pages can still benefit from the asynchronous javascript to safeguard against performance problems in the face of technical problems. This change is easy to make by referring to our example code.

If our chat servers are completely unavailable, and you have deployed older, non-asynchronous JavaScript, your larger web page may hang for a period of time, partially-loaded, waiting for that JavaScript. If the chat JavaScript is at the end of the body, the rest of your page content will load as normal even if our chat server is totally down.

Identifying the asynchronously-loading JavaScript

How to tell which code you have deployed? The newer-style (asynchronous) code looks like this:

<!-- Place this script as near to the end of your BODY as possible. -->
<script
 type="text/javascript">
  (function() {
    var x = document.createElement("script"); x.type = "text/javascript"; x.async = true;
    x.src = (document.location.protocol === "https:" ? "https://" : "http://") + "libraryh3lp.com/js/libraryh3lp.js?multi";
    var y = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; y.parentNode.insertBefore(x, y);
  })();
</script>

Or, as generated from our chat snippet management page and providing centralized storage for the details of your chat service:

<!-- Place this script as near to the end of your BODY as possible. -->
<script
 type="text/javascript">
  (function() {
    var x = document.createElement("script"); x.type = "text/javascript"; x.async = true;
    x.src = (document.location.protocol === "https:" ? "https://" : "http://") + "libraryh3lp.com/js/libraryh3lp.js?XXXX";
    var y = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; y.parentNode.insertBefore(x, y);
  })();
</script>

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