Babble - A Chat Plugin

Okay, I’ve pushed a fix to display the chat by default if there’s only one (and you haven’t enabled the user-to-user messaging functionality)

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Sooo the sandbox died under mysterious circumstances the other day, so I’ve had to stand up a new instance. Same address (https://discourse-babble.com), but you’ll have to make a new account if you had one before.

Thanks!

Thanks for the wonderful plugin. I am facing a problem and not sure if it is something others are facing as well. The group / category discussions are real-time. However, the personal chat is not updating real time, i.e. when I am chatting with another user the other user can see that I am typing something but the message does not show up in the chat log even after I hit enter. The person has to close the chat widget or move to another chat to get the notification that a message is pending. This is contrary to the group/category chat where all messages are being rendered real time. I guess it might have to do with only a show view (ajax?)

Thanks for the report; I’ve identified the issue and will try to get a fix out soon.

EDIT: Alright, this should now be fixed in latest.

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I’m sorry I haven’t been able to test this yet, James. My Discourse test environment is not functional right now and may not be live again until next week.

Giving you feedback on this great feature request is a top priority once I can actually test.

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Hi James, I’ve started testing Babble and in general, it looks like a great plugin, but I have discovered a few odd bugs.

I’ve been unable to access the one-to-one messaging, even though I have it enabled, as shown:

Babble doesn’t fully work with the Brand Header theme component — with or without the adaptive height setting enabled. This is how it looks when the page is scrolled own and the brand header is hidden:

When adaptive height is enabled, then closing the chat also produces this effect:

Finally, the oddest bug of all appears to affect OAuth logins. Whenever a user logs in using an OAuth provider, the browser downloads /babble/notifications.mp3 rather than redirecting as usual. Disabling Babble doesn’t stop this behaviour, but instead of downloading the file, a broken page is loaded from the same URL:

Any insights appreciated.

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Hi James, a suggestion / feature request. If a not logged-in user (prospective participant on the forum) can see the chat in a view mode, that can act as a trigger for him/her to sign up to the forum. I haven’t looked at the code yet, not sure if this is a simple feature or not.

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Hi James,

The new chat brings a slight disturbance in the force at my forum :wink:

One of the requests I received since installing it is if it is possible to disable the notifications on a per-user basis, for instance on their personal preferences page.

Would that be possible you think?

Sure, possible, I’ll put it on the list.

It’s likely not a simple feature, but we have had the option in the past (It was taken out because it complicated the code a lot). I’m open to a PR towards it, but likely not something I’ll work on myself.

Those are, indeed, a few odd bugs. Some things to check for for the PMs not appearing:

  • Ensure you have babble private messaging enabled (it’s default off)
  • Ensure that the enable_personal_messages setting is set to true
  • Ensure that your trust level is above the min_trust_to_send_messages site setting (I think default is 2)
  • Ensure you have another user on your forum for which all of the above are true.

If you link me to your forum I’ll have a peek at why the adaptive height might have regressed, and I’ll fix the OAuth thing this week. Thanks for your reporting!

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All the above are true. Currently, we only have staff registered so we can all message each other and the min_trust level is 1, which again, everyone fulfils.

The site’s currently set as invite-only — if you PM me your email, I’ll send you an invite

Alright, here’s some initial responses:

  • I believe the trust level of the admin created when the site is stood up isn’t getting something set properly, because I remember running into the same issue when setting up the sandbox. I was able to access the PMs as a newly invited user. I was able to fix by manually setting my trust level in the rails console. I’m going to throw an explicit check in there to always allow admins access to the pm feature.

  • The adaptive height isn’t working because of some custom CSS in a theme component, namely this line:

.d-header { margin-top: 48px; }

I’m not sure if I can guarantee that it’ll work with absolutely any CSS related to a header that gets put in there, but this seems like a case we should be able to handle, so I’ll have a look at fixing it for that case.

  • I’ve also got a fix for the OAuth thing, but can’t push anything this second due to internet issues; I’ll get it out there as soon as I can.
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This seems to be the case here — I checked my account and discovered I was TL0, as you suggested. Updated that and now I see the users listed as expected. :+1:

I’ve discovered one more incompatibility, however. Using the graceful theme (named “Elegant” on our site), the chat icon isn’t displayed at all. You can select that theme from the hamburger menu to see for yourself

Hi! The same goes for the Vincent-theme.

I’m not sure if this is an issue with Babble or with the theme though.

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@Not-The-Foggiest Is correct, for some reason there is a new topic made everytime someone messages on babble.

Yes, that’s the case; all Babble chats run on the Discourse topic engine; it’s the only way to effectively store and relate the chat information correctly from within a plugin.

We exclude those topics in a lot of places (like the latest topics list, and in User statistics), so if you’re a bit more specific about where you’re seeing these new topics show up I can likely exclude them from there as well.

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Maybe @Johani or @awesomerobot can help shed some light on that; my best guess is that the html files included in those themes are somehow overwriting the below-site-header plugin outlet, and should be yielding to it somehow.

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Just tried the plugin on a fresh install, and with the graceful theme the bullhorn button appears… but doesn’t have any background so it’s hard to see. It was happening because I had background: transparent set on the global .btn class.

I added some styles to fix it

31%20PM

@Genyus, if you update the theme the button should be back…

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I applied the update and the icon is now visible. Thanks for the swift fix!

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Would it be possible to have users disable display of the icon, perhaps in preferences? I’m already starting to see complaints.

Adding user preferences is a bit trickier than I’d like, but there’s a couple user preference related requests so I’ll likely get to it at some point.

One approach for today might be to create a theme component with

.babble-sidebar-component,  #babble-icon { display: none };

in it, and allow users to select their theme based on whether they want Babble to appear or not
(Ie, you could have Vincent (with chat) and Vincent (without chat) as selectable themes)

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