Well as most of you can see the Shout Box is back.  The developer updated it with a newer version which should keep us from being shut down by using to many resources on the shared server. 

For our newer Buds that have joined recently the Shout Box has been around the site for awhile for instant communications on the site for all to see.  We have had many fun times with this box. 

We will still have the Bud Chat Room which will be used for bigger conversations as needed.

So lets test out this Shout Box and see what happens.

Here is a brief description of the new Shout Box from the Dev.

After quite a while, the long awaited new release of the Shoutbox Pro is ready. This version has a great new feature: a high performance option. Some users noted that on a shared webhosting the shoutbox can be a bit too heavy and with this new option we fixed it! Instead of loading the complete Joomla! framework for each AJAX request, we just load the relevant query without the Joomla! framework, resulting in much less CPU usage. However, there is one downside: you'll lose the ability to use smilies and bbcode (because the framework is not loaded). We're thinking about a fix for this in the next version. You can find the high performance option in the advanced module parameters