Real time chat

luceos

antonjw personally I'd love to hear your opinions more often. Please voice them!

antonjw

luceos Hi luceos. That is a much, much more welcoming reply than some I have received on phpBB.com!

Flarum is a very promising looking software. I check back every now and then to see how it is progressing. It seems to have a nice community which is really engaged in making this a great system. It's very refreshing to see some open-mindedness and new developments in the forum software world.

antonjw

Kulga I like it.

And because it is real-time, I'd like to see displayed next to the word 'chat' some information as to how popular the chat is currently; either number of users currently in there, and / or the number of unread posts.

For a 'live event' type of chat, the number of current users or users in the last say, 10 minutes, might be of value.

For just a regular 'shoutbox' type chat, just the number of unread items might suffice.

Also what would be cool is the ability to have a chat automatically commence (and appear in the nav) at a specified time, and end at a specified time. And optionally convert it into a forum thread for archiving when it is done (it might have been an epic chat session or just have contained something useful; or it might have been entirely transient, in which case it would just be trashed).

antonjw

luceos This is a nice idea. That would be a lovely hybrid of real time chat and 'forum thread'. I would go for that immediately on our forum as a replacement for our real-time chat plugin.

And it would please some of our users who still bemoan the addition of the chat room (we have 'match threads' for football matches, and also the real-time chat for the same purpose - your idea would perfectly unify them and is really what I've been thinking of for about 3 years, just not as crystal clearly as you have put it).

I do think the future for forums is 'types of threads' (or 'types of discussions'), in a similar way that Wordpress has 'types of posts'. So here, you have a Chat Thread. That dictates the layout and functionality of the thread, as you describe.

You would have Blog Threads; where the opening post is formatted a bit more formally, as a blog article, and the rest are comments.

You could have micro-blog threads, which are more frivolous and could be punched in by having a 'status' box at the top of each forum. No title, just punch in your thoughts. The user gets the option of displaying them in amongst the real threads, or not. To tie that in to how forums traditionally work, if one of these generates lots of replies, a member of site staff or trusted user can give it a title and 'promote' it to 'forum thread' status.

For forum threads, if a thread's opening post is wordy and well-liked, it could be optionally or automatically be granted 'blog thread' status, and if Flarum was integrated with a website, pingg, you have a new blog post (for those more casual visitors) with lots of comments, created completely organically from natural community activity. Not a bad feature for community-driven content sites?

I seriously think you have hit the nail firmly on the head, luceos.

wizgriz

Do one thing and do it well.

Flarum is forum software and forums engage a very specific type of communication. This is a good thing. I think the reason people might expect Flarum to be anything more, or radically changing some kind of paradigm, is because it simply doesn't look like a traditional forum, forming some sort of dissonance.

The reality is that forums are a niche. They serve an important, but limited, purpose. Not every website needs a forum and Flarum shouldn't strive to change that. It should focus on being the best forum out there to fill this niche.

If you need chat, use something dedicated to chat. If you need a blog/comments, use something dedicated to that. If you need a forum, use something dedicated to that.

Flarum's focus on extensibility can also be deceiving. I suppose you could technically do anything with extensions, and turn Flarum into some sort of web platform capable of being any or all of these things. But that sounds stupid to me. I like how much focus there's put on what the core is because it explains this so well: Extensions extend the core. They don't change it. So, what is the core? (A forum.)

JRay

wizgriz I suppose you could technically do anything with extensions, and turn Flarum into some sort of web platform capable of being any or all of these things. But that sounds stupid to me.

But that's exactly what happened with WordPress. They created a solid core based on one focus but allowed people to extend it however they needed.

antonjw

Wordpress & other CMS' have 'Post Types', because they deal with various Content Types.

Forums are about discussions. Discussions take different forms. So why not have a system which has 'Discussion Types', and handles them all well enough to unify them? In fact, you already have that, because most forums have Threads and Private Messages.

So just extending that to cover some other types ought to be well in scope for a system which is about discussion and community, for me, and didn't ought to be beyond mankind, or even forum developers ?

wizgriz

JRay How are Wordpress and Flarum related?

antonjw Forums are one form of discussion. The incorporation of PMs are there for convenience (their counterpart being email - not very convenient), and I agree with this. PMs could definitely benefit from having real-time functionality. But people should never come to Flarum specifically for this feature - PMs are usually closely related to ongoing forum discussions.

antonjw

wizgriz Technically; 'Threaded Topics' are just one form of discussion. But I am glad we agree that internet forums are all about discussion ?

JRay

wizgriz JRay How are Wordpress and Flarum related?

They are both publishing platforms. Wordpress is for sites who want publish authored content (1-way). Flarum (et al) are for sites that want publish user generated content (2-way).

Franz

ron_jeremy Haha, just try making a post like that on Slack, though. ?

I just now read through this thread (so sad that I didn't have time to do so until now) and must say, very interesting discussion. The idea of different thread types is very intriguiging, to say the least. Another possible type that comes to mind: a list of comments for a blog post. (We've had this idea for a while: allow for a thread to be embedded on another site, using a widget-like thing in an iframe; very similar to Disqus, but driven by a site's Flarum instance, with their user accounts and so on...)

antonjw

Franz Take a look at https://discuss.flarum.org/d/2068-types-of-threads-flarum-as-a-discussion-engine

I've expanded further there on the idea of thread types, and how they might work. Would be interesting to see your thoughts.

ANONIMNIQ

luceos I've been spying this feature request for some time and wondered the following.

What if the current threads would update automatically and showed who was typing/viewing. Wouldn't that make the forum more like a chat?
If the above, what form of actual chat (as proposed above) would make sense?

I like this idea. Something like this will be awesome:

ANONIMNIQ

Bonus idea for integration with Byobu extension:

luceos

ANONIMNIQ both of these are actually very interesting possibilities and within easy reach for byobu. Thanks for both!

Webinsane

I have not seen any forum use WebRTC technology. That could be fun 😀

Applepiee

Is there any update on having a chatbox? Like someone mentioned, the instant replies are nice, but you get a lot of "Hi" posts on your forum.

User24

Kulga I love this idea! Any heads up regarding this?

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