Notifications and Refresh without Pusher, etc.

I've been wondering about this as well recently. I hadn't bothered to look into Pusher, and didn't even realize it was a third-party service until @Toby mentioned it in response to a query about page update behavior.

I'm hoping Flarum won't be too reliant on third party solutions that an admin may or may not want to use.

Here's some alternatives. Haven't tested any of them but Firehose looks good.
According to the sandbox install, disabling should be as easy as this.

Fastidious Why can a pusher not be locally hosted? The current plugin doesn't permit but I fail to see why the pusher must be located somewhere else on a different server.

I would have assumed they would at least offer the user to use Pusher or some other service (for the shared hosting admins), or a self-hosted one (for the more experienced admins). With it being a setting in the admin panel or something.

A list of real-time technologies, some that can be used as alternatives, both hosted and self-hosted can be found http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-web-technologies-guide

Dominion They might have something in mind but it seems like the best out of box would be using the pusher service already supported.
I mean, that's the point of pusher, to provide a 1-2-3 service for a fee. I mean, you get 20 concurrent without charge.
By hosting your own, you obtain the responsibility of managing it but don't rely on a third party service (and its cost)

Dominion I've been thinking about this..
I hate to keep referring to wordpress.. but they have a wp-cron.php file that when run, causes it to "update" - so to speak. By default, every action you do on a wordpress site causes wp-cron.php to run.
This is really, really inefficient but also moderately effective and as you might mention - very out of box supported.
The problem is, php programs have no sense of time. It is a server-side renderer that generates html pages. This is worsened by the fact that flarum doesn't even refresh when you go from page to page (this is why notifications don't show up until you refresh the page - I noticed this for much longer with noscript).

Because of that, it's impossible for flarum to mimick what a pusher service provides. Any attempt will have to be a hack (like wp-cron.php) and be hard-coded to pull content on certain clicks. Should it do it on every page scroll? Clicking on discussions? Doing nothing would result in nothing ever showing up as a notification and is almost guaranteed to result in slower page loads (since it's doing more) and potential scaling issues (flarum-cron.php being run every half second on a busy site?) something has to tell flarum that something has changed, please run code to update it.

Both toby and franz are devs that know magnitudes more then me about php coding, so maybe they have some idea of circumventing wordpress's (and piwiks) best implementation of dealing with the php and time issue.

But as it stands, I'm sorry to say this, but if you're on a shared hoster, or simply don't want to know how to start and configure services outside of a webserver, you're going to be stuck. There are solutions, but I wouldn't call them optimal :\, or even if they would work as a forum notifier..

I'm aware that pusher is planning to be rewritten, but it looks like it's primarily focused on other components. I'm hoping it can be slightly modified to permit designating a ip address and port @Toby. If they both follow the same protocol, then it should be a drop in replacement (pusher.com -> slanger, etc) and I can get to testing how well it works, bugs, etc.

After having read most of this thread I'd like to clarify some technicalities.

It's very nice to talk about pusher and slanger without knowing what they facilitate. To keep it simple (which it is), both use the same piece of javascript. So switching between those server endpoints is as easy as changing the configuration of listenening and serving.

Websockets are continuous connections between machines. They can be used to send over data whenever you like. Normal behaviour is that any visitor on a website is registered on some channels and php sends data to these visitors whenever necessary. There are a lot of benefits to using websockets, to mention some:

• truly knowing whether someone is online (green circles talked about around avatars are exact)
• no continuous requests to the server asking questions (ajax)
• direct notifications, not every x minutes, about updates on threads

To give you some dimensions of use, some of you might know battlelog by EA; it uses pusher almost solely. At work I also implemented websockets (at first slanger, proving less stable we moved to pusher) which notifies accounts immediately about any finished tasks once done, shows us a list of all online accounts in real-time and shows us a dashboard of open tickets.. The application is endless using websockets.

I'm a big fan of websockets.

Ps please be aware that pusher is more stable, it also caps maximum payload data. So switching requires you to understand the max length of the data you're sending.

luceos I think the issue is not the usability of Websockets (they're great!), but the fact that pusher is a paid app. And on top of that, the user has to embed a 64KB js file as well? That's not right.

And to put icing on the cake, the free version allows for only 20 connections?

I'd personally rather just use nodejs and the ws module here. (And use the normal html 5 websocket connection api that's like 2 lines of code) Much, much better.