We have attempted to archive our main channel chat history into the post function every month, and then initiate a new main channel chat. Given the volume of our messages, amounting to a few thousand each month, we noticed that the backup process halts after a certain number of posts/replies have been created, and not all the chat history gets backed up. We would appreciate guidance on how to improve this situation.
Our community heavily relies on chats. We have concerns about the performance slowing down if we keep an unlimited channel chat history. Indeed, some of our users have already noticed performance issues when the chat volume is large.
It would be ideal if we had a function that would allow us to backup/archive chat to the post automatically on a weekly or even daily basis, and then open a new main channel chat. If your upstream team does not plan to incorporate such a feature, we would consider developing and open-source a plugin for that. We would greatly appreciate your guidance in this matter.
After running our community for six months, it is clear that our user base prefers chat more. Consequently, we hope that the discourse chat feature will continue to develop and integrate more seamlessly with posts in the future. Many thanks.
A few thousand per month doesn’t sound like too much, to me. We do see sites currently using chat at a rate of 10-30K messages per week. Can you share your numbers with a bit more precision?
I’m not sure what limitations we currently have in place by design. I’ll look into getting some answers about that. The archive feature isn’t heavily used to my knowledge. It could be that you’re hitting some limitations we’re not yet aware of. Many other sites treat chat as more ephemeral, and use “quote to topic” more sparingly to intentionally capture specific conversations in chat they care about, rather than archiving everything.
Perhaps archiving your chat more frequently would help?
I think my ideal here would be to have an option to have a running (daily) archive without having to close the channel. The retention period could then be configured so that messages for a given day are periodically captured in a topic, and then later deleted by the retention settings.
I think doing something like this is something we may do eventually, but it’s not something we’ve discussed in depth as a team.
Happy to discuss it more here, but it isn’t on our near term roadmap at this time.
It’s an understandable question. We don’t yet have any reporting for chat on the admin dashboard, which is where you might look first for something like this.
There are some stats available on /about though (chat messages in the last 7 days and last 30 days, for example). Those alone would help inform the discussion here (and let others who are or are not experience the same issue as you compare and better understand why).
Building a strong link between chat/forum is one of our major goals. We will keep discussing this internally, so this might not move much in the near future but improving this is something I think would make sense.
auto backup the chat every day to a post (with open AI summarized title).
auto close the channel every certain day such as 30 days and open a new channel.
We have not yet put it into the production environment. we hope that can help our community user. I think there is a trend that uses chat more then the posts due to the current social media habit of the people for short messages.
