Moving users from Whatsapp to Discourse Chat

[GeoffSchultz]

Last year I created a discourse forum at knysnayachtowners.org and it was welcomed by some, but many users continued to use the WhatsApp group that has been around for years. I can understand that, as they get immediate responses from other owners.

I am trying to see if an alternative would be to use the Discourse app on their phones and utilize the chat feature. However, when I post something to the General chat channel, I see that the chat icon in the app gets a blue dot, but there’s no other notification. That isn’t sufficient in my opinion. People need/want that popup notification that you get on WhatsApp.

Is there something that I’m missing, or is that just how it works? Do people have other suggestions? Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide.

[Moin]

@GeoffSchultz

but there’s no other notification

What notification do you expect?
You can enable push notifications for all activity in the settings of each channel. However, I am not sure if you can change the default for that or if every user would have to do it on every channel.

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

Unfortunately, you can’t set the defaults at the site level (or indeed at the Channel level) - only at the user level.

I don’t think that anything has changed since this:

@nathank

@JBM

on the chat: you have to specifically specify a group or a person in each message for him to be notified.

That is configurable, albeit not easily.

For personal chats, the default is being auto-notified for every message. This can be turned down for each chat thread by the user.

For channels, the default is as you describe. Users can change that to every message if they wish.

The last time I looked, the only way to change the default behaviour was to delve into the Rails console. Getting this into the UI could be a worthy feature request

Of note, you can work around this by using the @all mention (notifies all those in the Channel).

I’d encourage someone to put in a formal request in Feature describing what you need it to do.

[GeoffSchultz]

I was looking for functionality similar to what WhatsApp provides, which is a push notification when a new message comes in. I don’t want to have to tell each user how to configure this.