Since I have a large number of channels in my chat (over 20 at this point), I came up with a simplified way to manage channel lists for the various groups of users.
The first part was to switch from using the array() function to range() which let's me abbreviate the lists to a start and end.
range(0,10) is equivalent to array(0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10)
The second part was to set up a couple of ranges based on user permissions (Admin/Mod or Registered User)
$staffChans = range(0,21); // Admins and Moderators
$userChans = range(0,19); // Registered users
Finally, all that needs to be done is to assign those variables to the users themselves
// Sample admin user:
$users[1] = array();
$users[1]['userRole'] = AJAX_CHAT_ADMIN;
$users[1]['userName'] = 'admin';
$users[1]['password'] = 'null';
$users[1]['channels'] = $staffChans;
// Sample moderator user:
$users[2] = array();
$users[2]['userRole'] = AJAX_CHAT_MODERATOR;
$users[2]['userName'] = 'moderator';
$users[2]['password'] = 'null';
$users[2]['channels'] = $staffChans
// Sample registered user:
$users[3] = array();
$users[3]['userRole'] = AJAX_CHAT_USER;
$users[3]['userName'] = 'user';
$users[3]['password'] = 'null';
$users[3]['channels'] = $userChans
Simply refreshing the page -SHOULD- do it (shift+F5 in Firefox and Chrome), but you may need to clear the cache