Babble Chat

[Boost]

Do you have the plugin enabled in discourse settings?

[Dev_Work (Aleksandr)]

Yes. And ./launcher rebuild app too

[ninermac]

@angus With the lodash removal it looks like we lost the functionality that was taking the user to their first unread chat when opening Babble. Also, there is no dividing line between read and unread any longer.

Was that intentional s part of the move from lodash? I’ve looked through the changes myself, but nothing stood out to me, but I’m only a hack at Discourse.

Thanks for all you’re doing here to keep this active.

[sunjam (james.network)]

Is anyone able to display the expanded chat by default rather than just the icon?

[rossmith49 (Ross Smith)]

I’m on the latest Discourse version, as well as Babble. We’re experiencing consistent issues with Babble just providing the spinning wheel icon and never going through. In most instances you are forced to do a hard refresh of the browser to see if the message went through.

Example of what I see after every chat I send:

[TheBaby5 (Bug Reporter)]

Same issue we are also facing a never ending spinning wheel icon, I hope they fix this soon.

[TheBaby5 (Bug Reporter)]

Also notification never end, it keeps showing new message!

[chrispanag (Christos Panagiotakopoulos)]

Any update here? The plugin is currently broken on version 2.6.0.beta5 and we had to disable it completely

Thank you in advance for all your hard work, it’s greatly appreciated!

[jrgong]

Hey guys

Is it possible to give moderators permissions to babble chat settings?
We keep hitting the roadblock of reaching 10,000 posts in the chat topic.

I want to give moderators the ability to open a new chat. At this point we have to create a new one every week or two. The chat is super popular

[JoelZaslofsky]

tl;dr – It would be great to have someone(s) adopt James Kiesel’s Babble plugin. There are precedents for Discourse plugin adoptions (example) and I know too many people who use Babble don’t want to see it slowly deteriorate to the point where it becomes obsolete.

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There’s been a trend over the past two or so years with fewer and fewer updates or bug fixes to Babble. There’s no judgment here – @gdpelican made it quite clear on the original Babble forum thread that he doesn’t have the incentive or desire to continue with Babble. I certainly respect that.

@angus and others have pitched in to fix bugs over the last year or so – which I’m grateful for – but how long can the seemingly random generosity of devs last?

I’m not sure what the process might be to have Babble get adopted by another developer or team of developers. @jomaxro, @simon, or @justin – I think one of you or another Discourse team member might be able to help us out here.

Although I can’t find it anymore, I do believe there was once a discussion about incorporating Babble into Discourse core and the decision was made not to do that. Assuming there’s no chance Babble will become part of Discourse core and therefore officially supported, I don’t see a good path to being able to continue using a functional Babble without someone taking primary responsibility for it.

If money is an issue, I’m happy to seed the pot if necessary on behalf of my Babble-using forum.

I don’t think band-aids and slow, reactive bug fixes are going to cut it much longer with Babble. Can we save it before it becomes unusable?

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P.S. I know all about Discourse’s integrations with things like Slack for a chat-like experience within Discourse. I like Babble and don’t want to integrate with a third-party tool for the casual chat experience.

[jomaxro (Joshua Rosenfeld)]

At this time there are no plans for the Discourse team itself to adopt the plugin.

[chrispanag (Christos Panagiotakopoulos)]

I think at least this should be moved to the #plugin:broken-plugin category, until the bugs get resolved.

[sbernhard (Bernhard Suttner)]

This would be a great addition to discourse if you want to have a discussion board and a very lightweight chat feature. Unfortunately it’s not maintained, it’s broken and no official discourse feature…

I don’t want to have a full blown chat server which has again some featues discourse have, too. This is something very complicated for users as they don’t know which system they should use then.

[sunjam (james.network)]

@sbernhard

I don’t want to have a full blown chat server which has again some featues discourse have, too. This is something very complicated for users as they don’t know which system they should use then.

We get around this problem 90% by using chat-integration to send topics & replies from particular categories/tags to particular chat systems/channels. babble is a loss, but general integration is the part that really makes Discourse work for our particular community alongside other chat systems.

Discourse Chat Integration Plugin

Chat Integration is for using an external chat system together with Discourse — you may be looking for Discourse Chat which adds Chat functionality directly to Discourse. Summary Discourse Chat Integration allows you to integrate your chat system of choice with Discourse. Repository Link https://github.com/discourse/discourse-chat-integration Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse Features discours…

[ninermac]

I used it in that way for quite sometime until it started to fall apart.

I ended up starting my own rocket chat server. Babble was good enough to make chat a staple on my site. Rocket chat runs so much smoother. It’s so good though that it’s probably going to decrease forum usage, but it’s too late for me to put that genie back in the bottle.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

I’ll fix the immediate issues here in the next day or so, however I agree it needs a dedicated developer.

I’m a little too busy to be that person. The other members of Pavilion are also stretched with their open source responsibilities.

If someone wants to take this plugin on properly, there’s a spot in Pavilion for you, with the access to ongoing paid work that entails.

Like the other members of Pavilion have, you’ll get mentoring from me to get you up to speed with Discourse development.

Message me here on meta if you’re interested.

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey guys, I’ve resolved the spinner issue. Update to the latest version of the plugin and it is working again. You can test it out here: https://try.thepavilion.io (there seems to be a slight style issue with the babble icon on that site, but the functionality works fine; it’s probably a conflict with another plugin or theme)

https://github.com/gdpelican/babble/commit/83b697d28304525456c25a7de2d905c70c44fd75

@jomaxro Could you re-categorize this one? Thanks.

Failing a developer keen to take this plugin on, I’ll settle for someone(s) willing to help with a few things to keep this plugin alive:

1. Triage bugs, ideally via the more structured wizards on thepavilion.io: thepavilion.io/w/bug-report and thepavilion.io/w/feature-request. I’ve added babble as an option in there:

   

   The reason those wizards exist is that when you have a mega-topic like this one it’s hard to keep track of individual issues.

2. Start to write comprehensive documentation for the plugin here: https://thepavilion.io/c/knowledge/plugins/babble/186 (see the other plugin categories in https://thepavilion.io/c/knowledge/plugins/171 for examples). The reason this is helpful is that the same questions, or issues about a plugin will pop up regularly and it takes up time to respond to queries that have previously popped up.

3. Respond to other users of the plugin here in this topic with links to those wizards, and the documentation when… you write it

If maintaining this plugin was more a matter of clearing a clearly defined list of issues every once in a while, with good descriptions, logs and associated screenshots etc, then that’s a much easier proposition time-wise.

Also, if you submit a bug reports via thepavilion.io/w/bug-report, I will now get automatically assigned to it, and it’ll make my stats look bad if I don’t close it…

So I’m much more likely to action it sooner if you submit a full bug report, with logs, screenshots and good descriptions.

I’m still going to have this plugin on my list of open source assets to find a new owner for, however if collectively we can do the above, we’ll be able to at least maintain it in a decent state.

[JoelZaslofsky]

Can I double and triple your last post, Angus?

Thanks for fixing the issue with the constantly spinning wheel icon in the chat when you post something. The only bigger outstanding UX issue I can think of right now is that the icon letting you know there’s a new message in the chat never goes away, even after reading all messages. @TheBaby5 gave the high-level overview of that one.

I just did a quick test and @ninermac’s bug report from October 20 doesn’t seem like an issue on our Discourse install.

I see some minor items in this giant thread that could still be addressed, but they’re not mission critical from my perspective. For example, @Dev_Work has one from October 20 about a missing translation.

@angus

Failing a developer keen to take this plugin on, I’ll settle for someone(s) willing to help with a few things to keep this plugin alive:

Triage bugs, ideally via the more structured wizards on thepavilion.io: thepavilion.io/w/bug-report and thepavilion.io/w/feature-request. I’ve added babble as an option in there:

I’m absolutely willing to report bugs with full documentation at Pavilion. I agree that logging them here in this giant thread isn’t ideal.

@angus

Also, if you submit a bug reports via thepavilion.io/w/bug-report, I will now get automatically assigned to it, and it’ll make my stats look bad if I don’t close it…

Wait a moment. Are you saying, time allowing, that you’re going to fix future Babble bugs out of the goodness of your heart? Because that’s what I think (or maybe just hope) you’re saying.

We’ve already had a lot of generosity with Babble over the years with James maintaining it well beyond when it was practical for him. I’m all for more generosity and I give it myself in many ways and many places, but I want to make sure you/we are setting the right expectations here.

@angus

I’m still going to have this plugin on my list of open source assets to find a new owner for …

Me too. I’m no developer and I mostly orbit around the Discourse ecosystem instead of drop into the gravity well of it. But I’m all about the open source ethos and finding the people who will make communication better and easier for the many folks who use, love, and can’t live without Discourse (that’s me!).

Whatever you do from here, Angus, you’re a total .

[REALITY (Jon)]

Angus! Thank you for fixing this!

I found this useful…

If you don’t need the full screen option but would like a wider option.

It changes the full screen toggle to a predefined page width instead.

Plonk this in: CSS/HTML > Desktop

.babble-sidebar { &.expanded { width: 500px !important; } }

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

@JoelZaslofsky

Wait a moment. Are you saying, time allowing, that you’re going to fix future Babble bugs out of the goodness of your heart? Because that’s what I think (or maybe just hope) you’re saying.

Pavilion, our non-profit cooperative, exists for three purposes (these are taken directly from a new set of articles of association I’m in the process of registering)

1. provide opportunities for work, education and related services to providers of services and products to online communities;
2. facilitate the provision of services and products, and the development of open source technology, for the benefit of online communities; and
3. pursue socioeconomic diversity amongst the recipients of the benefits and opportunities in objects (a) and (b).

This is what we do We’re currently building a new website that explains this better (and I’ll be releasing a big new open source landing pages plugin for discourse alongside it).

@JoelZaslofsky

Thanks for fixing the issue with the constantly spinning wheel icon in the chat when you post something. The only bigger outstanding UX issue I can think of right now is that the icon letting you know there’s a new message in the chat never goes away, even after reading all messages. @TheBaby5 gave the high-level overview of that one.

I just did a quick test and @ninermac’s bug report from October 20 doesn’t seem like an issue on our Discourse install.

Thanks for these notes. Ideally, if those folks could submit bug reports: Pavilion, then I’ll be able to action them systematically over time.

@JoelZaslofsky

I’m no developer

We need you just as much as a developer . Here’s some Babble knowledge management that needs doing:

1. Update the first post in this topic to better reflect the current state of the plugin (it’s a wiki). Take a look at the custom wizard plugin OP for an example structure.

2. Create a “How to setup Babble” topic in the knowledge category I set up: Pavilion.

3. Create a “How to customise Babble” topic in that category. @REALITY That would be the place for your useful CSS suggestion, which unfortunately, will otherwise be lost in the mega-topic.

Don’t worry about writing “the wrong thing”. If you make a mistake, or what you write is unclear, others (such as myself) will help you correct it. That’s the beauty of being part of an open source community.