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.

We accept payment via PayPal. PayPal accepts most credit and debit cards, and depending on your region, you may be able to check out without creating a PayPal account. In some regions it is also possible to pay via bank transfer ("eCheck") through PayPal.

If you have any difficulties making payment, please contact us, and we can assist.

Getting started

This feature requires some familiarity with hosting your own scripts on the Web. Our code examples are in PHP, but you can use any platform and programming language you like, providing you can access HTTP POST data.

The Cbox webhook is an HTTP POST callback mechanism for getting a copy of new messages as they are posted to your Cbox. A couple of lines of PHP are sufficient to get started:

<?php
$input = @file_get_contents("php://input");
$json = json_decode($input);

// $json contains array of messages

error_log(print_r($json, true), 1, "your-email@example.com");

echo "OK";
?>

With the above code uploaded to your server, test that it works by opening the corresponding URL, e.g. https://yoursite.example.com/cbox.php, and confirming that you see "OK". You can then enter it as your callback URL in your Cbox settings.

When a user posts a message, Cbox will issue an HTTP POST request to your callback URL, with Content-Type application/json. The request body will look something like this:

[{"type":"message","box":802140,"channel":0,"time":1488526982,"uid":0,"name":"test","text":"this is a test","link":"","ip":"0.0.0.0"}]

The object is an array of messages. There can be multiple messages in a single POST. Your code can do whatever you like with the messages; it just needs to return an HTTP OK status to Cbox. Any response body is ignored.

Message contents

The message webhook is located after the message-accepted stage and before filtering. This means your endpoint will only receive messages that are being published on your Cbox (i.e. not messages from banned users). They will be "raw", having none of the built-in or custom filters applied (i.e. no boxcode expansion). Important to note is that messages can contain any UTF-8 character, and so should be escaped as appropriate before storage or display.

Message properties:

• type — always set to "message"
• box — your Cbox ID.
• channel — The channel ID to which the message was posted.
• id — The message ID.
• time — Unix times when the message was received.
• uid — Registered user ID. Guest IDs are undefined or zero.
• name — The user's name, as entered.
• text — The text of the message, as entered.
• link — Link associated with the message; the profile URL.
• ip — IP address of the user.

Errors and retry

Your endpoint needs to return an HTTP success header (status codes in the 2XX range) in response to the POST. If it returns any other status, or times out, Cbox will consider the delivery to have failed. On failure, Cbox will buffer messages for retry. Cbox will retry the POST at increasingly long intervals, even in the absence of further new messages.

Cbox buffers are not unlimited; if your endpoint is down for an extended time, the oldest messages may be dropped.

Notes

• Cbox ignores the body sent in response to the POST, and does not wait for it to complete.
• Return a 200 OK to Cbox as quickly as possible. Otherwise, there is a risk of a timeout, which will cause the same message(s) to be re-sent. If your message processing is slow, move it "offline", either by completing and flushing the HTTP response early and continuing to work, or by offloading incoming messages to another service.
• For forwards-compatibility, confirm that type == 'message' in your code; new event types may be supported in future.
• The box and channel properties mean you can multiplex several Cboxes to a single endpoint, and filter or switch based on channel.
• Message ID is a monotonically increasing number. Larger IDs are always newer messages.
• Although some properties are 32-bit integers, it's recommended that you treat all values as UTF-8 strings for storage or further processing.
• The POST request includes a custom HTTP header, X-Cbox-Time which contains the Unix timestamp at the moment the POST was sent. You can use this to calculate differential message times.

There are a number of commands you can enter in your Cbox to perform actions that would otherwise require a tap or click, or that are not available through other means.

Note that commands are not formally supported by Cbox, and are liable to change, or not to function, at any time.

Enter commands as if they were messages in your Cbox:

• //debug [watch] — shows debugging information.
• //reload [clean] — refreshes the Cbox iframe. Enter //reload clean to clear local data. (This will log you out and reset preferences.)
• //ignore joe — ignore the user joe. Leave out the name to get a list of currently-ignored users. Repeat the command with an ignored name to un-ignore that person.
• //pm mary hello! — sends hello! to the user called mary. (Requires private messaging to be enabled.)
• //colors — open a colour palette to change your message text colour (requires boxcode to be enabled.)
• //tetris, //sudoku, //wordsearch game-id — for wordsearch, invite another user to enter the same command, with the same game-id, to join your game.

If you have a Premium or Pro Cbox, you can create a moderator account for yourself here, and then ban people with one click while logged in to your Cbox. You will see [x][o] links next to each message. Clicking the [o] will ban that user.

Alternatively, go to your Messages page, select a message from the user you want to ban, and click the "Ban" link.

Your Blocked users page lists the bans currently in force. To unban someone, select the ban and click "Unban". Bans that show as "expired" will be cleared within a few minutes.

Cbox Pro provides a very simple API for creating new channels on the fly.

At the Channels page in your control panel you will find your secret API URL. You can open this URL directly in your browser to test it, but it's intended to be called by back-end scripts running on your own site.

The return format for this call is a single line of tab-separated plain-text fields. If there was an error, the first field is "FAIL" and the second field is an error code. If a new thread was successfully generated, the first field is "OK", and the second and third fields are the thread ID and thread key, respectively.

By way of example, this very simple PHP script will generate threads for your Cbox. New threads created via the API will show up in your control panel, but you should store the thread ID and key in your own database as well.

<?php 
$cb_tid = null;
$cb_tkey = null;

$cb_rs = file_get_contents('YOUR_API_URL', 'r');

$cb_rp = explode("\t", $cb_rs);

if ($cb_rp[0] === 'FAIL') {
	// There was an error. 
	// $cb_rp[1] contains the error code
}
else if ($cb_rp[0] === 'OK') {
	// Success
	$cb_tid = $cb_rp[1];
	$cb_tkey = $cb_rp[2];
}
else {
	// Some other error occured.
}

if ($cb_tid && $cb_tkey) {
	// New key generated. Store $cb_tid and $cb_tkey in your database or user session.
	// And insert them into your Cbox HTML code iframe src URLs: 
	// ....&sec=main&tid=<?php echo $cb_tid;?>&tkey=<?php echo $cb_tkey;?>
	// ....&sec=form&tid=<?php echo $cb_tid;?>&tkey=<?php echo $cb_tkey;?>
}
?>