Babble - A Chat Plugin

Hm, yes, looks like a recent change to Discourse of some kind. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.

EDIT: @JanJoost This is now fixed in latest.

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You’re a superstar! I’ll go and test, will report back! Thanks!

Update: Works like a charm! Thanks very much!

Bug: Babble icon shows up even for users not authorized to use it or even those who’ve disabled it on mobile.

Thanks for the report.

I’ve just pushed a fix which ensure the chat doesn’t show up until we confirm that there are chat channels you can participate in.

I wasn’t able to repro any issues with the babble_disabled user setting, are you able to be a bit more specific with the problem you’re seeing there?

Idea: close the chat box when you tap the back button on your smartphone.
Some users had trouble finding the close button, so they hit the back button and got redirected to the previous page instead of closing the chat box.

Hi there,

@gdpelican thanks for developing so active on this!

We are evaluating if we want to include a chat into our community platform. While there are many good reasons for offering a realtime-chat functionality there is a chance, to loosing content, which would have found its place into the more persistent forum.

This and earlier comments and features makes me think, that the chat lays in categories which I chose, when creating a channel. But I can not find the “Thread view” of the chat. Is there none, or can someone hint me to it?

EDIT: I have found a link to the chat (some lucky webhook, got me there) but still I am very curious what the default navigation would be.

Thanks.

Hi @einsiedlerkrebs,

The chat is stored as a topic in the database, so it’s as persistent as other content on the forum. The thread view is not really supported, as chats and topics are quite different in the way they are interacted with and displayed. You are able to scroll back in the chat indefinitely, although it’s not searchable at the moment.

I wonder if you’d be able to state a bit more clearly what kind of feature you’re looking for?

The chat box covers the content (thread, posts, avatars) at a width of 1590px and similar.
At smaller widths (for example 100px less, 1490px) the content gets pushed aside. I think the content should get pushed at 1590px too. Tested on the demo page.

Thanks for your reply.

Chat and forum are diverging in terms of persistence. We are doubting if a chat would make us loose (some) quality content to this infinity. Therefore if we would get access to the chat-history we might be able cherry pick some content by splitting or plain copying it.

Thats why I asked for a setting, that would make the chat topic (history) visible/linkable.

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Hey guys! 2 quick questions.

  1. Is there a way tu customise the group icon?
  2. Is there a way to list more user in the chat section?

I’m quite hesitant to hijack the back button from a plugin; it’s a browser action that javascript can’t really listen to for security reasons and wouldn’t be very comfortable with putting a hack in for it.

I’ve bumped the threshold for pushing up to 1600px in the latest.

There’s not a way to do this at this time, but PRs are welcome for this.

I’ve just put in a site setting called ‘babble_initial_user_count’ for number of PMs shown on initial load, default 10.

Thanks for the feedback!

The best case scenario would be to load only active users through the who’s online plugin.

Other thing, is there a way to customise the template used to display messages?

I’d like to add a class to differenciate yourself from other users. (So it’s more like Instagram and Facebook)

Love the plugin so far :man_dancing:

I’ve put in an attribute that should let you select on only your messages, like so:

.babble-post[data-my-post] { background: mauve; }

I’m not willing to increase the dependency on the Who’s Online plugin (I’m closer to taking out that feature than expanding on it, as inter-plugin dependencies are icky). I’d be happy to look at a PR for doing this internally in Babble, but do not have plans to work on it myself.

Feels like a silly question, but would you mind explaining what PR stands for?

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Hey there I just integrated the babble plugin into our forum! Awesome work. 2 questions however:

  1. I don’t see the option to open the babble chat automatically upon opening the forum, it’s not in the admin or plugin’s settings.
  2. Groups don’t get transferred to the babble chat. I can’t find how to add group chats to babble chat either.

Kind regards!

I’ve moved this to a user setting, so you can find it under your own preferences -> Interface panel

I’ve added a note in the README saying as such, thanks for that.

Can you be a bit more specific about what you mean by this? Screenshots would help as well if possible.

I think you can look at navigation.history, you can ‘push’ a new entry one, so if someone goes back then it goes to the prior entry without reloading the page, when closing the chat interface you should just pop the entry you put on yourself.

Right. But the hack’s not there, it’s on triggering an event (closing the chat pane) when the back button is actually pressed.

Check out the accepted answer (and comments) on a relevant SO question here:

EDIT: I’ll have a look at this at some point to see if there’s a better way, but it’d likely be quicker to submit a PR if you have a fix in mind.

Found it! I didn’t knew of you don’t asign a babble chat to a category is does get appointed to the chosen group only who can view it and it shows under “groups” in babble.