Introducing public group chats
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Let's take a stroll down memory lane and see how the chat system has evolved over the years.
The initial chat feature was built 10 years ago and used websockets to send text messages. The message history wasn't even saved in this first iteration and it was limited to 2 users.
This first version was built using popup windows. In 2014 a separate page for chats was built in https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/1788
In 2015 group chats were introduced allowing more than 2 users. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/7289/group-chat-changes
After this the chat page didn't see any drastic changes, the design stayed mostly the same until we released 3.0.0 with Harmony theme.
Even though we allowed group chats since 2015 the way it was built wasn't scalable to lots of users. It was meant to be used to create chats between a small number of users. Adding thousands of users to a single room would make it really slow due to how the data was stored and delivered to each user. Without going into too much detail; the previous system would naively try to deliver a new message to all users in the room even if they weren't online.
The upcoming 3.3.0 release will add support for public group chats and allow bigger rooms.
Administrators will be able to create public chat rooms and select which groups can access them. If you select
registered-usersit would be accessible to everyone who registers to your forum.
Public rooms allow users to view the entire chat history unlike private rooms where you only see messages sent after you have joined.
You can test by going to https://community.nodebb.org/chats. Hopefully you won't see our admin chats
This feature is on the
developbranch for anyone wanting to test it on their dev forums.Happy chatting
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@crazycells
what happens when you click one of the public rooms? Any errors in your browser console? -
With every update, I feel like NodeBB is not a forum, but a native app for the fast communication
The new group chat interface is technically elegancy! 
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additionally, will there be any "public chat" shortcut on the navigation var?
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@crazycells said in Introducing public group chats:
is this error normal?
This should be fixed now, thanks for reporting.
Since the navigation is customizable it's up to the admin to add a link if they want to
/chats. -
Very very cool !
like you now, I've been waiting for this for a very long time ^^
If it works correctly, it's awesome ^^Will there be moderation tools on the admin side? Edition, deletion, emptying of the room for example?
Will this be a good alternative to the Shoutbox plugin?
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Useful feature!
It would be very nice if there were emoji reactions, like in Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, Google Chat, Discord, and basically any platform... -
@BrotherGlaucon Memory usage will increase based on how many users are online in the room. I am not sure how much memory each socket.io room uses per user.
