A Shoutbox style plugin for Discourse.

Warning: this fork contains minor customizations for my own Discourse instance running at https://www.macmini-forum.de. They also rely on other, private plugins. So please be warned that this fork is not for you. Thank you!

Currently still under development!

Installation:

• Edit your web template and add the project clone url. (https://meta.discourse.org/t/install-a-plugin/19157)
• Rebuild your web container so that the plugin installs.
• In your Discourse setup, ensure that the option "allow uncategorized topics" is checked, otherwise the babble topic creation step you need to perform WILL fail.
• Enter your running web container and launch the rails console.
  • [sudo] ./launcher enter app
  • rails c
• In the rails console, enter: Babble::Topic.create_topic("your_babble_topic_name")
  • You should get green text in response to the above command, which starts off with <Topic id: (a number)
  • (If you see <Topic id: nil, try using a longer topic name; it needs to be at least as long as the min_topic_title_length site setting on your instance, which defaults to 15 characters.)
• Exit the console by typing 'exit'. Exit the container by typing 'exit' again.

Things that work great:

• Sending messages to other clients
• Live updating of chat window with new messages
• Scrolling of window when opening dropdown / new messages come in
• Updating unread counter when a new message comes in
• Updating the read counter in the backend when posts are read
• Live updating the unread counter when posts are read

Things that work not-great:

• Need to identify which stats are being updated (post count etc.), and which stats should be updated
• Chat responsiveness is still slower than I'd like
• Likely other things; let me know!

Things that I'd like to add:

• Pagination (likely load previous page)
• Editing a recent post of yours
• Allowing user to mute chat notifications
• Adding a context switcher to allow for multiple chat threads
• Post timing tracking

Pull requests welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md

You can view some ongoing discussion about this plugin on Discourse Meta