Chatting functionalities

[itzomen]

Feature Suggestion

Would it be possible to add chat box functionalities to remark42 because the commenting engine is very similar to a chatting service. With a couple of tweaks, we can add that to remark42.

I will be happy to assist in this feature if it's something you think is possible or aligns with the objectives of remark42

Thanks

[umputun]

pls use discussions for such idea's sharing. moved to "Ideas"

[umputun]

I don't think this is what close or too similar. Sure, on a basic level if all you care is a common "chat root" (some kind of forum?) this will be somewhat similar. However, making a real chat out of this will require a lot of efforts and a lot of changes.

[umputun]

a short list of things remark42 doesn't have but chat use-case requires:

• ability to mention other users (we have a ticket about supporting @name)
• ability to send notification to the chat app
• real-time updates
• indication of user typing something
• support of limited (protected or private) groups/channels
• some way to invite people to those channels
• some kind of user status (online/away/whatever)

those are things I realized without even trying to analyze the real impact. Some of this can be useful for the core functionality, but most of changes would be irrelevant for commenting.

Unless I missing something and you have a clever idea how to make chat from the comment engine without such a massive and unrelated development, I would say - remark42 is not the right platform to serve chat applications. There are decent open-source chats already, like mattermost doing all of this and much much more,

[paskal]

However, if @itzomen wants to assist us in implementing real-time updates to the discussions so the person sees the new comments in real-time, it would be great. We are interested in having that functionality and even had backend support for it, but no one implemented the frontend.
For details, please see #253, #357, and #826.

[itzomen]

@umputun thanks for moving to discussion
Yeah I see what you mean, but I'm referring to a minimal chat setup nothing crazy like group chats or that will cause significant changes to remark42.

What I'm referring to is something like a chat bubble that can be included on any web page for support, reviews, etc. Or maybe implementing different UI to embed remark42 so we can be pretty flexible on how and where to embed it to a webpage

[itzomen]

@paskal so we need to subscribe to the stream API and inform/notify the user when they're updates ?

[paskal]

@itzomen yes, the idea is to subscribe to the stream of updates and update the UI once a new comment arrives.