How to finish making a scrolling chatroom?

Question

I am programming a chatroom for my website, and I've came a long a bi of a snag. Hopefully you all can help me =)

Anyway, I am wondering if there is a way to manipulate MySQL or PHP to make them return information backwards. I have tried using ORDER BY ASC and DESC... with no success. My chatroom automatically scrolls to the bottom and I want the chat's most recent reply to appear very last in the box, and then have the earlier replies trail off upward. Kind of like Facebook chat. Any ideas as to how I could accomplish this? :/

Thanks!

Answer 1

In php before the output just do an array_reverse on the list of messages.

Here you have the documentation http://php.net/manual/en/function.array-reverse.php

Answer 2

You could install a jQuery plugin like this, then use something like:

$('.message').sortElements(function(a, b){
    return $(a).attr('title') > $(b).attr('title') ? 1 : -1;
});

This assumes that you set the title of each message element to be the timestamp of when that message is sent. Though I would just attach a non-standard attribute i.e. timtestamp to each message tag, then you would use:

$('.message').sortElements(function(a, b){
    return $(a).attr('timestamp') > $(b).attr('timestamp') ? 1 : -1;
});