Help & Support

Your Cbox embed code is available at your control panel. You need this code to install your Cbox on your website.

Also on that page is your Quick Link — a URL which you can use to access your Cbox directly in your browser or on your mobile device.

Once you have created your Cbox account, go to the Publish page of your control panel. The code and steps for embedding your Cbox are provided there for a number of common platforms.

If you install your Cbox and all you see is code, or nothing at all, your web host may be removing or otherwise interfering with the HTML iframe tags that Cbox uses. Your Cbox code needs to be pasted into an area of your site that accepts HTML without modification. This may mean switching your editor from "rich text" or "WYSIWYG" mode into HTML-editing or "raw" mode, or you may need to open your template files in a plain-text editor like Notepad.

Remember that you always have the option of posting or sharing your Cbox Quick Link — this gives visitors direct access to your Cbox in a full-screen layout, so it's perfect as a mobile option or for stand-alone use.

Go to the Theme editor in your control panel. There you can specify the fonts and colours of your Cbox, using a point-and-click editor. You can always reset your theme to one of the preset defaults there, if you would like to start again.

If you have a Premium or Pro Cbox you can edit CSS, which gives you complete control over presentation.

If you have a Premium or Pro Cbox, you can create a moderator name for yourself at your Users page, and then log in on your Cbox using the "profile" link. You will see a delete icon [x] next to each message in your Cbox, and you will not have to log in at your control panel at all to delete messages.

Alternatively, visit your Messages page to delete messages individually or in bulk. Deleted messages are removed from your public Cbox history, but are preserved in your Archives.

Yes. In the Theme editor, simply delete the colour codes for the main and form background ("BG") elements. This will make the Cbox transparent, allowing whatever is behind the Cbox to show through.

Note that any pop-ups generated by a transparent Cbox will have the default background colour — usually white. If your font colour is light, it may be invisible in popups. You can fix this by editing the CSS to introduce a background-color rule for popups.

You need to have cookies enabled in your browser in order to use the control panel. Your browser may be configured not to accept cookies, or it may be in a "private browsing" mode, or you may have a plugin or extension that is restricting them. Test in another browser if possible.

In the Date options in your control panel, there is a "Zone" setting. Click the [reset] link to have Cbox attempt to figure out the correct time zone based on your current clock time. If it's still not correct according to the example shown on that page, add or subtract 1 from the Zone number until the example time shown is correct. Your time zone may be negative or positive.

You can also change the "Date display" option to show relative timestamps — this way the clock time is not shown on your Cbox at all, but rather a relative time, such as "2 minutes ago".

Cbox Premium and Pro allow you to customize the four built-in usergroup name colours at your Themes page. The group colours you can specify are Normal, Registered, Moderator, and Admin. These correspond to the user types at your Users page.

In addition, you can use Filtering rules to specify unique styles for selected names, including unregistered ones. To do this, add rules as follows, one per line:

jacob:[color=green]jacob[/color]

In the above example "jacob" is the name of the user. You can change the colour to any valid HTML colour name or hex code. You will need to have boxcode enabled in order for this to work.

The "Welcome to Cbox" message appears if there are no other messages to display. You can disable or change it simply by posting a Sticky message.

Note however that the Sticky message differs from the Welcome message in that it remains visible on your Cbox even after other messages have been posted.

You need some development experience to make use of this feature, with the ability to edit your site's back-end code.

Cbox Pro supports Integration, which is a way to implement single sign-on. If users already log in or register with your site, Integration means they don't have to enter their name again on your Cbox.

Configure Integration at your control panel. Example code is available there. The rest of this article deals with general concerns.

How it works

Integration is implemented using query string parameters appended to the Cbox iframe URL. The final parameter is a signature generated from the rest of the URL. You don't need any external components or callbacks, just language support for HMAC-SHA256, base64-encoding, and url-encoding.

The signature is important to secure the generated URL against tampering by the user or any other intermediary. However, most back-end platforms have built-in support for the necessary functions.

Integrating avatars and profile links

The only required parameter is nme, for the user's name, and the signature, sig. But you can also pass lnk and pic parameters to Cbox, to take advantage of name links and avatars, respectively. These should be provided as absolute URLs. For example, https://yoursite.example.com/path/to/image.gif. Note that the respective display settings need to be enabled for name links or avatars to show up.

Integrating with mod/admin permissions

Integrated users' names will be registered with Cbox automatically, if they aren't already. This means you can confer mod/admin permissions at your Users page.

You can also use Integration with Moderated chat. With Moderated mode enabled, your Integrated users by default will not have voice permission. You will be able to review their messages as a mod or admin user in your Cbox and approve them accordingly.

Security

Note that if you have existing users registered before enabling Integration, they are authenticated by Integration regardless of their password. This means if you have an existing "admin" user registered with a password on your Cbox, and you then enable Integration, the corresponding user named "admin" on your site will get that name (and permission). This can be an advantage, but if it's a risk in your case, delete all registered users before enabling Integration.

The signature in the Integrated Cbox URL protects the name and other information in transit. However, if you are concerned about leaked URLs, you can limit URL validity by passing an additional (signed) query string parameter, valid_to, which should be set to a UNIX timestamp. The URL will stop working after the time specified.

You can also change the key used to generate the signature, by changing your security tag. This invalidates all your Cbox URLs, but requires that you change your published Cbox embed code accordingly.

Debugging

If you get an error in your Cbox saying that there's a problem with Integration, the most common cause is an invalid signature.

The first thing to do is right-click and inspect the Cbox iframe URL. You should have nme=...&sig=... parameters populated in the query string. If not, check that your embed code is in place and being parsed without errors.

If the sig parameter is present in the URL, confirm that it is being generated using the correct secret key. The key is available at your Integration page.

Ensure that you are url-encoding your query string parameters exactly once, and encoding before calculating the signature. The signature itself must then also be url-encoded, and appended to the URL. If you see the sequence %25XX in the URL, that's a sign that you might be applying url-encoding to already url-encoded strings.

If you are still getting errors, contact us including the code you are using and an example URL, and we should be able to assist.