Has anyone built something for informal status updates - Chat?

[sam]

Technically authoring a plugin for this is fairly simple, the big issue is design, where does this fit in? We have no aux column

[Ajarn]

Usually they live at the top of pages, so at least at the top of latest.

[Huey_Le]

Some forum like PhpBB put them at the footer of the page with message like this:

WHO'S ONLINE:
In total there are 6 users online :  3 Registered, 1 Hidden and 2 Guests 
Most users ever online was 45 on Thu Dec 19, 2013 1:54 pm

Registered Users: lorem, ipsum, floremipsum

[Mittineague]

But isn’t that like the old “this page has been visited ### times” counters?

Interesting stats for the site admin, but I can’t imagine it being all that useful for visitors.

Have any evidence such is helpful in any way or just a theory?

Right now you can go to Latest and see recent Activity and user avatars, how is that failing?

[sam]

This has nothing to do with shoutbox, seems totally unrelated, Try the shoutbox chat

[Devanil]

I tried to put a third-party shoutbox, was not very good. I was attempting to use the sidebar plugin and put it there.

Here an idea:

But surely with a better design

Could be linked to a topic. So one could use the shoutbox (only on the homepage), or go to the topic.

Shoutbox is the thing I most hope to launch in Discourse

off: No one realized that this is a hi-five, not a prayer?

[Huey_Le]

How about an persistent icon on right next to the Notification icon. Users click on that icon —> the Shout box dialog will appear and users can just chat in there?

[Devanil]

This is awesome.

[sam]

That UI could potentially work, though they would probably want a “full screen” mode so you can just shove it in a tab.

[Huey_Le]

I think it’s similar to how Facebook Chat works. Chat dialog can be easily accessed anywhere when users need to post some messages.

[JSey]

@Huey_Le @sam the combination of that icon plus a dedicated “chat thread”/category looks ideal to me. The only thing I wonder is: can we suppress a given thread/category from being listed in the normal listings (latest, new etc.)? Then the rest should be relatively easy I suppose: the drop down could be an iframe-ish display of that thread/category, and users could open that thread in a tab if they must.

[DavidGNavas]

can we suppress a given thread/category from being listed in the normal listings (latest, new etc.)?

Hide a category on latest tab is possible:

Can I hide a category from the Latest page?

So these are my settings, and everything works great. [image] [image] Except when I log out, Staff is still in the top menu. [image] It’s not a huge deal, but would be nice if that was automatically hidden to users not in the staff group.

But we and i think other people too are expecting that team improve this feature because i think is not possible hide the subcategories from a category, nor two or multiple categories.

Can I hide a category from the Latest page?

I’m keen to get this feature implemented too. We’re having problems with one unimportant subcategory dominating the Latest page. I’ve used the latest,-[category] method for now.

[cfstras]

How about just using a dedicated thread for chat? The only thing necessary for that would be seperate, more loose posting restrictions. For example, short, quick posts should be allowed.
The only thing missing then would be a little CSS on that thread (can you put custom CSS only on a category?) to hide all those buttons’n’margins™.

[purldator]

There’s something like that already implemented on a Discourse install in the wild, but I prefer said thread be available from an icon in the upper right as per @Huey_Le’s mock up above.

[JSey]

The only thing necessary for that would be seperate, more loose posting restrictions.

Which are per-thread (or per-category) settings of post length etc. - which we haven’t. If I look at @purldator’s link, the sheer length of that monster thread makes me a bit sick… In my current non- -shoutbox, I have a simple TOL for all chat messages, or simply a limit of, say, 2000 messages. If more are coming in, the oldest ones get deleted. Who cares about yesterday’s chat messages? That’s something else that bothers me - I could use such a garbage collector for another use case I have on my current forum (a marketplace board in which threads get auto-deleted after n days).

[Huey_Le]

Which are per-thread (or per-category) settings of post length etc. - which we haven’t. If I look at @purldator’s link, the sheer length of that monster thread makes me a bit sick… In my current non- -shoutbox, I have a simple TOL for all chat messages, or simply a limit of, say, 2000 messages. If more are coming in, the oldest ones get deleted. Who cares about yesterday’s chat messages? That’s something else that bothers me - I could use such a garbage collector for another use case I have on my current forum (a marketplace board in which threads get auto-deleted after n days).

Agreed, should be able to set the max limit for shoutbox messages

[jooize]

That mockup (I assume) looks incredible, is there anyone up to the task of implementing it as a plugin? How much work would you estimate it requires, and is money encouraging?

[Huey_Le]

I don’t know how much would it cost but perhaps someone can actually open a crowd-funding campaign to raise money to hire developer to develop this.

[JSey]

Well, actually, I am currently working on it as my second nah, it really would be the third plugin (which is not a complete rip-off of another existing plugin). Here’s what I have at the moment:

…the design approach if crappy, I don’t have any notifications yet, development speed is glacial because I have to drill into Discourse’s inner workings, brush up my Ruby and Ember knowledge, and I do this in my spare time (among many other things) but I guess in a few weeks I can put out a first version to fiddle around with.

Currently, there are too many things hard coded and only working with my instance; I have a strange problem that code works only in the development version, but not in the production release, but the thing I like the best is: it works!

(Yeah, money always helps, but I currently cannot provide the service level which would justify anything like this… )

[jooize]

Great work! For the community we’re looking to use this with we would prefer to have the reply box open all the time and not cover the conversation. You do as you like of course.

Is it hosted on GitHub, or do you want to keep it private for now?