Earnie_Baird is offering a paid bounty for help with four Discourse Chat issues: 1) a bug preventing text selection in the iOS chat composer, 2) missing video thumbnails in iOS chat, 3) a feature request for read-only chat channels (allowing staff-only posting with threading enabled), and 4) a feature to disable email notifications when @all is used while preserving push notifications.
joffreyjaffeux volunteered to fix the text selection bug, noting a similar issue exists in regular topics. The video thumbnail issue on iOS Safari was initially suspected to be browser-related merefield, but it was determined that chat uses a different HTML tag than posts, requiring a fix. blake explained the original reasoning for the difference in HTML rendering and suggested potential tweaks.
joffreyjaffeux implemented a fix for the video thumbnail issue via this commit, though it may require reversion. Further improvements were made with another pull request [blake](/t/-/346074/14], resulting in a positive update pmusaraj and appreciation from Earnie_Baird. Earnie_Baird reiterated the importance of video thumbnails for user experience.
I’m looking for some help with 4 issues on Discourse Chat. If you think you can help with any of these please get in touch:
1. Bug: Text Can’t be Selected in Chat Composer on iOS
In the chat composer window, if you type in a message and select text it will highlight a word but then not allow you to adjust your selection by moving the dots on either end of the word.
That’s great news and thank you so much. We’ve heard about this bug from a few of our users and it would be wonderful to have it fixed for all discourse users.
@j.jaffeux this looks like a bug in Safari browser to me?
When opened in Firefox or Chrome, with the exact same video attachment, the video tag renders correctly with “a preview”, would you concur? (in quotes as I don’t believe it relies upon Discourse app thumbnail processing).
That suggests there isn’t anything we can do app side?
I note the issue only occurs in chat which uses the <video html tag prior to watching.
On Posts, in which the preview is rendered correctly on Safari, Discourse appears to employ a <div class"video-placeholder-container" … and a “faked” video poster placeholder before you click at which point it switches to the <video version.
As a bit of background we never implemented video placeholders for chat, it just relies on HTML5 video tag features to make it work. We implemented our own placeholder logic originally for topic/posts because videos were auto “downloading” data on every single topic load even if they weren’t being played chewing up cdn costs on popular sites.
I don’t think we need to re-implement the same placeholder logic we have for topics in chat just yet, but there still may be some ios/safari tweaks we will need to make in order for things to work on iOS. I thought just having the preload="metadata" attribute would do the trick, but looks like that is already present.
hey @blake - wanted to also follow up on this one. To the extent that this was already fixed somewhere else and it can be applied to chat that would be great.
We have a lot of people share videos in our community and and when there are no thumbnails many users think that video functionality is broken since on all other platforms (SMS, slack, discord, etc.) you always see a thumbnail when a video is posted.
looking pretty, pretty good!