Forum Discussion

peluso's avatar
peluso
Ace
9 years ago

Chat function like Slack?

Does anyone have experience with adding a chat function to Lithium? Is it even possible? I'm finding Lithium and creating an open source developer community may not be possible with a developer audience (b2b).  We have users of our products & solutions and then we have developers creating their own solutions on top of our products.  very different use cases.

 

I'd appreciate any thoughts on the topic as well. Thanks!!!

  • VarunGrazitti's avatar
    VarunGrazitti
    9 years ago

    peluso - As you might have seen throughout the community that OOB chat function was discontinued a long time ago, so short answer is, No. However, it is not the end of the world, you can always make a custom chat feature. We did build a PoC for our customer which works great. It can show the user's online status, show your friends online, send/ receive real time messages just like facebook chat etc.

     

    On top of everything, the live chat actually doesn't make any sense in the context of the forums. When you have a chat feature enabled, your community would start to get lesser and lesser posts asking questions/ giving answers because most of them would be given over the chat it self. Which means a user looking for answers would never get any. You can however, restrict the chat to certain roles/ ranks to have a lesser effect on the community health.

     

    Hope this helps.

  • peluso's avatar
    peluso
    9 years ago

    Makes sense Varun,

     

    Thanks!

  • VarunGrazitti's avatar
    VarunGrazitti
    Boss
    9 years ago

    peluso - As you might have seen throughout the community that OOB chat function was discontinued a long time ago, so short answer is, No. However, it is not the end of the world, you can always make a custom chat feature. We did build a PoC for our customer which works great. It can show the user's online status, show your friends online, send/ receive real time messages just like facebook chat etc.

     

    On top of everything, the live chat actually doesn't make any sense in the context of the forums. When you have a chat feature enabled, your community would start to get lesser and lesser posts asking questions/ giving answers because most of them would be given over the chat it self. Which means a user looking for answers would never get any. You can however, restrict the chat to certain roles/ ranks to have a lesser effect on the community health.

     

    Hope this helps.

    • MJWatt's avatar
      MJWatt
      Guide
      7 years ago

      This solution is a bit of a guardrail perspective.  Live chat makes sense for events - and even adds to the collateral if you capture the discussion after it's placed in an archival/passive state. 

       

      NOT having chat eliminates an entire potential medium for community platforms in one-time or regularly-defined intervals crafted around an active experience, and forces customers out of the experience in order to deliver these types of needs to the customer - which means either custom work or manual and clunky imports, and potential attrition.

       

      With Atlassian, Slack, Microsoft and Google all carrying chat mediums, the business world still carries need for active discourse, and this goes for customer-to-vendor and customer-to-customer discussions around a planned time period as well.  

       

      If a more direct example is needed, look at Reddit - they implemented the beta last fall, because their subreddits were doing it on their own when the platform's integration wasn't available.  Reddit is one of the most volatile common-web (vs the "actual" dark web) mediums on the internet, and chat is (and has always been) one of the riskiest attributes of the internet and networks in general -- so I'd be surprised if it was implemented without significant justification for feature demand and adoption.

    • peluso's avatar
      peluso
      Ace
      9 years ago

      Makes sense Varun,

       

      Thanks!

    • calebmt's avatar
      calebmt
      Maven
      7 years ago

      VarunGrazitti, is it possible to see what that custom chat feature looks like? What you've described is something we think we might like in our community.