Retrieving Room Status

Each Chaton room periodically dumps its status in a static url. You can access to it to monitor the room. The same information is provided in two different formats.

  • $ROOM/var/status.js : A JSON format.
  • $ROOM/var/status.scm : An S-expression format.

Substitute $ROOM by the room URL.

Currently the file includes the following information:

  • last-post : A unix time when the last post is submitted.
  • num-chatters : Number of clients connecting to the room. It includes applications using Chaton API.
  • post-sequence : An increasing integer indicating the number of posts. It can be reset, so the absolute value doesn't mean anything, but you can compare it with the value you previously fetched to find out how many posts are done inbetween (that is, most of the time---if you find this number suddrenly drops, the counter may be reset so you can't know exact posts; but usually this number serves the purpose for notifying unread messages to a user, for example.)

We plan to add more information, e.g. nicknames of the users in the room.

This information is not intended to be polled very frequently. If you need to monitor the room in real time, you want to use API. But these may be useful for some background processes that polls status in every 10 minutes, for example.