Speak with the Discourse product team about chat

[lindsey (Lindsey Fogle)]

Hey folks I recently joined the Discourse product team in support of Discourse’s chat product. It’s my job to learn as much as I can about how groups are using chat and how we could improve upon it to better support your community.

If your community uses Discourse chat, would you be willing to speak with me about your experiences so far? I’d like to know how your community uses chat today, what works well, what you wish you could change, and understand if / how you manage and moderate conversations in chat.

• Yes, I’d like to meet for a 30 min interview over Google Meet.
• Yes, I’d like to share my feedback in writing (PMs).
• No thanks, I’d rather not meet.

I’ll be reaching out directly to anyone who wants to participate — thanks in advance!

[maiki]

Gotta say: that’s a cool way to collect and pre-sort contacts in Discourse!

[sp-jordan-violet (Jordan Violet)]

Would love to talk! We certainly have hopes for what chat could be in the future

[matenauta]

I can use Jitsi but not Google Meet (and PMs for sure!). Tried to move a community from Discord to Discourse Chat and failed on it, so maybe our experience could improve crucial points on the whole experience.

I should be glad to help if I can. Kudos for joining the team!

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

@matenauta

I can use Jitsi but not Google Meet (and PMs for sure!).

I concur! I have to rely on Google for email, but it is nice to go FOS when feasible.

(PS it would be amazing to have that or similar integrated with chat)

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

This is hilarious (not in evil way, but still…). Product team of chat wants to chat about Chat via Google or PM and is not even offering… private chat. Answering internally to that could give some ideas because it looks like human resource is not seeing chat similar way than tech resource even at CDCK.

Well, not biggie, just a glitch I reckon. And I’m bit bored. Sorry, I can’t help because in my system chat is only a channel for low quality and fast… chatting.

[Bas (Bas van Leeuwen)]

Just like how a bike manufacturer will own a fleet of cars and trucks… you use the tools that are appropriate

For interactive feedback, a live video conversation with screen sharing is much more productive than chat. For communicating 1:1 across timezones, an asynchronous PM allows for quicker and richer communication than real-time chat would.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

Or a sales person pitching theirs time management solution and is using google calender for follow-ups (that actually has happened once).

What ever. Not a biggie and I just couldn’t resist temptation (but still… there is time and place think why own product is not suitable; lack of management such way what PM offers could be one reason).

Are we off topic now?

[JammyDodger]

@Jagster

Are we off topic now?

[sp-jordan-violet (Jordan Violet)]

@lindsey here is some context behind some of my thoughts (which I’ll share on our call), in priority order:

Extensibility/embed of chat

Embedding chat in another webpage?

I’d love to chime in here. In my case, we manage a community for developers who use our platform. In February of this year, we decided our first developer conference would likely have chat embedded next to the stream exactly like OP is describing. We would also want to allow staged users to chat too, FWIW. My team manages our internal hackathon, so we did a POC and used Discord and WidgetBot to embed the chat in the page and it was incredibly well-received. Now that we’re putting on our develo…

Chat + video conferencing

Kinda timely with the conversation that just happened above. Would love to see an integration with like Mux, Twilio Video, etc. to bring the full chat-adjacent experience into Discourse Chat.

A plugin for chat to connect to a video conferencing tool

We have an enterprise community where a portion of our community is support. To create an insanely cool experience on top of the already awesome chat, imagine this: User posts in a thread with an issue You recognize it will be a lot of fast back and fort, so you let them know and DM them After DM’ing, you’d love to do a screenshare to walk through it on screen My goodness, it would be so cool to be able to click a call & share screen button to connect with them on that next level. I’m not su…

Chat banners

Lastly, the ability to provide modal-like banners over chat with a message.

Display banner in chat (or modal-like message) for first-time users

We want to display a message (or modal-like cover over chat) to first time chat users with a message of our choice. In this case, we want to remind them that chat is for general discussion and support questions should still go to the forum.

[apleschu]

I’d be happy to have a chat. pun fully intended. Chat, PM, Google, Zoom, whatever

[Drew-ART (Drew)]

We’d love to see a ‘video call’ button on chat (which can be turned on or off in settings) so users in a chat channel can click it and it auto-generated and posts a Meet video call link in the channel, with a short invite message.

Right now we’re just manually posting Meet links, but a button brings it closer to users.

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

@Drew-ART

We’d love to see a ‘video call’ button on chat (which can be turned on or off in settings) so users in a chat channel can click it and it auto-generated and posts a Meet video call link in the channel, with a short invite message.

We’ve got this as a PR for Jitsi at the moment. It might be worth seeing if it can be replicated for Meet.

Putting a button into Chat for Jitsi calls

We’ve got a PR for this at the moment:

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

@nathank

It might be worth seeing if it can be replicated for Meet.

It can! Just need someone to review the PR is all.