Babble Chat

May have found a ui bug, a paltry one albeit, regarding translations.

When I hover over the x or expander button I get en.babble.expand_chat and en.babble.close_chat. Also, I am assuming that the icons are not meant to disappear when hovering over them, cluding hovering over the hamburger menu for the chat; aesthetics. Just some ux stuff to ponder. Otherwise, a great plugin.

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Thanks for the updates! The only new problem is the listing of category chats. They seem to be overlapping each other.

image

It should read
ā€œDivination Sceneā€
ā€œGeneral Discussionā€

Thanks again!

Sorry about that; should be fixed in the latest.

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Found another ux bug but itā€™s on mobile. I donā€™t know if you offer support for mobile view. This happens in chrome for android.

My wife just found this bug where the first message is cut off. The stock Samsung browser works fine for us and does the expected behavior.

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In my forum the chat plugin is not that heavily used.
I think it would encourage people to use it more if in the lower bottom of the browser window a tiny bar would say n users online whereas n= number of people with chat access are currently online (based on discourse online status)

Thoughts?

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Hi!

I took some time yesterday and created a Dutch translation. I can of course review my own entries, but not sure if thatā€™s desirable :wink:

The translation is there btw, in case you want to pick it up.

Hmm it seems like discourse has changed the way they render their header on mobile slightly. Iā€™ve put in a fix; let me know if that works for you. Iā€™ve also fixed some oddness with the new post action dropdowns. Excelsior!

JanJoost:

I took some time yesterday and created a Dutch translation

Thanks for the contribution! Iā€™ve pulled it into master and it should be available in the latest.

2 Likes

Thanks for the quick fixes lately, James.

I know itā€™s been about two months since you and @eatcodetravel were talking about collaborating on Babble upgrades. Did anything come out of that or will come out of it in the next few months?

I havenā€™t heard from him since the initial contact, unfortunately. Which upgrades in particular are you interested in?

About this, I had to ship it without these changes/features due time constraints sorry :frowning:.

But yeah @JoelZaslofsky, what features you need?

As an update, Iā€™ve been playing around with private messaging functionality in Babble over the past couple days. Hereā€™s where Iā€™m at at the moment:

Itā€™s a more slack-inspired interface, with the ability to dynamically create messaging channels between individual users (and the plumbing is there for facebookā€™s ā€˜dynamically creating chats with multiple peopleā€™ functionality as well)

Iā€™m also digging the ā€˜automatically openā€™ functionality, and am thinking about making it the default to open the sidebar chat to the channel list view by default on desktop (itā€™d feel a lot more like a slack thing that way, and would be a pretty prominent piece of your forum). Admin toggleable, of course.

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Thanks for being willing to take requests, guys. :slight_smile:

Sound notifications at the individual user level are still at the top of my list by far (discussed back in this thread).

I could come up with a bunch of other things, but I donā€™t know how much theyā€™d overlap with your own personal goals for the plugin and requests from other Babble users. So Iā€™ll refrain from giving you the full wishlist unless you say you want it all.

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Hi! Sorry to trouble you over this, but did you manage to find a way to keep the post count the way it should be?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks for the prompt; I have a fix for this but want to test it a bit more before merging it to master.

If youā€™d like to try it out yourself, change your clone URL in app.yml to point to the hold-counts branch, like so:

git clone -b hold-counts git@github.com:gdpelican/babble.git
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Happy to test, thatā€™s what the acceptance environment is for. Will report back here.

Any scenarios youā€™d like me to focus on?

@gdpelican
Did some preliminary testing, and indeed it looks better. Mind you, I am an excellent picker of nits, so be warned :wink:

How I tested

  • New user with post count 0
  • New chat

Scenario 1:

  • Access chat via bull-horn (chat side-bar). Add messages, check post count on user statistics page.
    Post count still 0.
  • Delete chat, create new chat.
    Post count still 0 (and not a negative number) - this is good

Scenario 2:

  • Find chat via search function. Access chat via the ā€˜normalā€™ topic rendering. Add 5 messages, check post count on user statistics page.
    Post count is now 5 (which is to be expected - weā€™re accessing the chat via the alternative rendering, so it behaves as a normal topic)
  • Delete chat, create new chat.
    Post count still 5 (at least not deducted).

This to me is perfectly acceptable behaviour - at least we do not end up with negative post counts any more, for the enthusiastic chat users.

The icing on the cake would be to deduct the post count from the posts entered via the normal topic-rendering, but I imagine that would be (nearly) impossible to achieve.

But to keep the analogy alive: The cake is already delicious this way, and Iā€™ll happily eat it. (The cake is no lie!)

Thanks!

The fix at the moment is a bit slapdash, essentially saying ā€˜skip over resetting user counts when you delete chatsā€™, which should be analogous to the ā€˜skip over resetting user counts when they make topics or posts in chatā€™.

Discourse is complicated software though, so Iā€™m not 100% certain at the moment that the counts / triggers modified on creation are 100% parallel to those modified on deletion. However, if youā€™re happy, Iā€™m happy, and will merge this after a little bit more smoke testing on my end.

Re: normal topic rendering, Iā€™d rather get to a point where you canā€™t render chats as normal topics at all, rather than making them work as both. Thereā€™s too much that can go wrong if we allow people to respond to chat topics with the normal Discourse flow, and vice versa.

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That makes sense - would be good. I know from the user base I have here that they do like the idea of ā€˜likingā€™ a post though. But then again, itā€™s a chat - they will just have to eat what we feed them! >: )

I (and others) have the ability to build that functionality (itā€™s basically a port of the Retort plugin :slight_smile: ), but likely not the functionality to make chats and Discourse topics 100% compatible.

I hadnā€™t even seen Retort but it looks fun! Thanks for the pointer!

As for the functionality: We can survive without it (and the users are already happy!), so thatā€™s all good.

I also found out that most people use the topic-view of the chat because it works a bit better for them on mobile apparently. Iā€™ll ask around what exactly it is that doesnā€™t work well for them in the normal chat-view, and will let you know.

Thanks again so far!