I’ve just installed this on my self-hosted instance. Testing it with some staff users right now.
Just playing around so far I like this! It will definitely find a place in my community.
Some things that I’ve not yet 100% figured out – so here is some early first impressions from kicking the tires.
Right now, only staff/admins can see chat - but if I add it to a public topic, are they the only ones who can see that button?
I like tying a topic and chat channel together, but aside one link they’re basically separate entities. I would like to see something indicate that chats/posts have happened in another spot in case they’re relevant.
When it comes to permissions I am not sure how “Reply” and “Create” apply to chat messages, but I assume “Reply” means people can chat…
Initially I found the “Category” channel term confusing, since there can be multiple channels per category. Not sure I have a better alternative, but just a note.
From a category’s page, I would love to see all of the of the associated chat channels.
In the browser channels page, and in the sidebar, I would love to see channels grouped by their category, following the order we defined for categories. Right now it seems to be alpha ordering, which is fine, but I think a category grouping would reduce things like “category-X-Y” “category-X-Z” channel names.
The UX for creating / editing channels is a little confusing. Which doesn’t the browse page also have a new channel button? It was a little unclear to need to go to browse in order to edit a channel.
Finally I think i’d like to dock the chat window to the right side, so its no longer floating and not covering content but still visible. I’ve got a wide screen, the posts will still be fine on the left side.
I’m sure some of these things are on your roadmap, or you know are gaps. The tool still seems really awesome and I’m still looking at how we can enable this widely in our community.
I did also encounter one bug:
Unhandled Promise Rejection: TypeError: t.canModifyMessages is not a function. (In 't.canModifyMessages(this.currentUser)', 't.canModifyMessages' is undefined)
I created a topic in a staff-only category. Then I clicked enable chat on that topic. The chat window popped up in the upper right, but this error occurred and I could not post. I used the < icon to get to theist of all channels, then selected the topic’s new chat channel. After that, posting worked correctly. Not really sure what else might have caused this one.
Anyway, hope that feedback is a useful point of view. thanks for all this work!
Great feedback @Michael_Ball! I think it makes sense to untangle this out into specific feature / bug /ux topics tagged chat so we can better focus on improvements.
Regarding the canModifyMessages error @joffreyjaffeux any ideas?
I found a workaround for the moment, using CSS to hide the start new personal message button from users who are not admins. Using the group classes component, you might be able to focus that on specific groups.
This could be easy to get around if people know CSS, so it might not work for you if you want it fully blocked.
Is there any way to connect a chatbot to the discourse-chat plugin at the moment, or is that on the roadmap? Maybe a way to redirect all the discourse-chat-integration stuff to the new chats?
If there was a way to use hubot or errbot chatbots in the new chats I think Discourse could serve as a very nice ChatOps solution too
I am a beginner at Discourse administration, and am using Cloudron on DigitalOcean. I’ve experimented with adding other plugins and creating my own plugins, with no problem. When I install the chat plugin, it causes my Discourse instance to stop responding. When I remove the plugin and restart, it takes a while but eventually comes back online. Is there something different I should do with using this on an instance managed with Cloudron, or is it not a viable combination?
Here is some Cloudron documentation with the instructions I’m using to install plugins via the terminal: Discourse - Cloudron Docs
I put it into recovery mode and it displayed the following error:
Error : Inactive - Error getting IP of redis-deb848df-b7cd-42f5-bb34-572dab2fd29f service
I’m upgrading it from 2GB RAM to 4GB in case redis is dying due to lack of resources. (Server administration is not my strong suit, so if that makes no sense as a solution, my bad - it’s the one thing I can think of to try.)
Awesome, thanks for finding the problem. I did the Cloudron install yesterday, so it’s as up to date as that system gives me. It sounds like I’ll have to get used to the standard install if I want to use the chat plugin…it’s probably time anyway
This looks amazing. is it possible to test in a hosted standard discourse? I’m starting a new community and already feeling tension between using Discord versus Discourse. We made a hard decision to go Discourse first, and lose the chat, but this looks like it exactly what we need
I’m in the exact same position, and made the same decision! Very cool. Ultimately way better to own your own data / platform than the discord model for a real business.
Why not try literatecomputing.com or communiteq.com as a way to get the advantages of self-hosting (e.g. the chat plugin) while avoiding getting your hands unduly dirty?
I’m not sure if they support the chat plugin while in its Beta state but they both provide excellent service and support for this type of stuff.
Mostly because I want to support the Discourse team directly. This software is amazing and they a great job.
For the Discourse team I am very interested in eseing this feature on hosted plans. If the sales team is out there please mark me down as a strong lead!
I’m sure some of these things are on your roadmap, or you know are gaps. The tool still seems really awesome and I’m still looking at how we can enable this widely in our community.
