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.

Cbox can display a status message showing who is currently typing a message in your Cbox. This feature is available to Premium and Pro Cboxes. Enable it in settings from the display users online drop-down.

We're excited about this feature, but please note that the technology that supports it is relatively new; there are some limitations and there may be some disruptions as we work on it in future.

You will often want to know when a message has been posted on your Cbox while you have been away from the chat. Today on Android smartphones and tablets using Chrome browser, and for Chrome on the desktop, it's possible to subscribe for push notifications for Cbox messages.

This feature is only available to paid Cboxes, at your Quick Link, and for technical reasons it's only available when the page is loaded over SSL/TLS. Your browser address bar should start https://my.cbox.ws/[your_Cbox_name]

Note: If you accidentally click "deny" to the browser permission request, you will need to reset your browser's privacy settings: in Chrome, delete the Cbox entry at chrome://settings/content under "Notifications" -> "Manage exceptions..."

If you see the bell icon at the top right, you are all set: click or tap the bell to subscribe. The first time you do this, your browser will ask permission to send you notifications on behalf of Cbox. Once we have subscribed you, the bell icon will change — you can click it again to unsubscribe from this Cbox.

Once you are subscribed for notifications, you will receive messages in your device's notification bar whenever new messages are posted to your Cbox. This will work even if the tab is closed. On desktop, Chrome may need to be running but you will not need to have Cbox open in any window.

You can have multiple subscriptions for different Cboxes and you will receive notifications for each. We combine notifications for channels and also rate-limit them to minimize potential disruption.

We are looking forward rolling this important feature out to more browsers and devices in future. Your feedback is invaluable during this process — let us know what you think.

At its simplest, the Custom filter is a list of words that you want hidden or replaced in your Cbox. Enter words, one per line, and if a user's name or message contains that word, it will be filtered out.

badword
badderword:betterword

When a message is applied to the above filter, "badword" will be turned into asterisks, and "badderword" will be replaced by "betterword". The ":" (colon) character separates the pattern text from the replacement text. If the colon is left out, the entire line is the word to match.

Filters can be useful for more interesting things too, however.

Styling and aliasing names

You can set colours for admins, mods and registered users on your Themes page, but you can create individualized filters for particular names or words you want to highlight.

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

This user would still enter "jacob" as his name in your Cbox, but whenever he posts, or whenever someone mentions him in a message, the output will be TheRealJacob, in green.

If you want to apply style besides colour to names, you can use the [class] boxcode.

jacob:[class=vip]{$0}[/vip]

You will then need to define your custom CSS for this class.

Using and disabling boxcode

Boxcode itself can be customised, making the combination of filtering and formatting very powerful. See more.

Your custom filtering rules support boxcode, as seen in the example above, even if you have boxcode disabled for messages in your Settings. You can also match the boxcode that people use (or attempt to use) in their messages.

![br]:/
haiku:The moment two bubbles[br]are united, they both vanish.[br]A lotus blooms.

The first rule will match "[br]" appearing in messages, and replace it with a slash. But the [br]s that appear in the second rule will still work, creating line breaks, because each replacement string is boxcode-filtered independently.

If boxcode is enabled for messages, then you can create aliases and compound boxcode using partial (open) tags:

![red]:[color=#f00][b]
![/red]:[/b][/color]

When a user enters [red]this is red[/red], the filter translates this to [color=#f00][b]this is red[/b][/color], which is now valid boxcode, and will in turn become HTML.

Tip: If a rule isn't matching when it should, try putting ! at the start of the line. If a rule is matching when it shouldn't, try putting ~ at the start of the line.

Filter modes

By default, filter rules are matched anywhere that the search text is not surrounded by other letters. Starting a line with the prefix "!" (exclamation mark) makes the rule a simple substring filter instead. Such rules are stronger in the sense that they will match in more contexts. However, unintended substitution is also more likely.

By contrast, a rule that begins with "~" (tilde) is only matched when preceded by space and followed by space or punctuation. This is similar to how emoticon substitution works. Such rules are looser in the sense that they are only matched in this specific form. Unintended substitution is less likely, but the rule may not be triggered as easily as desired.

fred:Fred
!color:colour
~plane:✈

In this example, the first rule will match the "fred" in "@fred" and "(fred)", but not in "freddy" or "alfred". The second rule will match "color" as well as "colorful" (substituting "colour" and "colourful" respectively). The third rule matches only "plane" by itself or followed by punctuation.

Filter order

Names and messages are filtered first by your custom rules. Messages are then parsed for smilies, boxcode, and links, in that order, if you have these features enabled. Names do not have these built-in filters applied.

Within your custom filter itself, the order of rule-matching is from top to bottom.

hi:hello
hello:goodbye

If a user posts "hi!", then as the message passes through the above rules it will be translated first to "hello!", and then, because it now matches the second rule, it becomes "goodbye!". In general, whenever a rule matches something that appears in another rule's replacement text, the order matters, and earlier rules can influence the effect of later ones. It's not recommended to depend on this behaviour, however. To create internal shortcuts, use variables.

Variables

A line beginning with a "$" (dollar sign) defines a variable that you can use in subsequent replacement text:

$pre:[big][color=#ff0000]
$suf:[/big][/color]
jane:{$pre}Jane{$suf}
john:{$pre}{$0}{$suf}

The first two lines do not match any name or message text; they define variables representing the strings following the colon. Variables are written in to the replacement string by surrounding them with braces. Variables in replacement text are expanded before filtering itself is applied to messages. The variable $0 is special: it contains the text that matched.

The Sticky message accepts boxcode, even if you have not enabled boxcode for ordinary messages. So to post a link, enter the following:

[url=https://mysite.com]This is a link[/url]

You can post an image as well:

[img=https://mysite.com/path/to/image.jpg]Description[/img]

See this article for a complete boxcode reference.

Yes. This will work if they are different Cboxes. If you want to show the same Cbox more than once on the page, you will need to make a small change to the embed code for each additional embed.

In your Cbox embed code you will see something like name="cboxmainA-123456" id="cboxmainA-123456" — this uniquely identifies the Cbox so that its frames can communicate with each other. The A-123456 part appears four times in total in the standard embed code. Edit it, simply adding a dash and a serial number, to make it A-123456-2, for example.