Poll: Site Chat Feature

[Tusky]

After a staff discussion the question was raised as to how much the chat is being used.

At the time of writing the last post in there is from the 27th of February, and there are only 18 posts from this year. The concern is that this may make it appear (esp. to new users) that nothing is happening on the forum. A "frequent" thing that people seemed to use the chat for was announcements, but could these be actual threads / replies instead? We also have Discord that can host chatting.

So we thought we could put it to the forum as a poll. Do people want to keep the chat? Or could it be removed.

[Mars]

By that, you mean the Discord widget (https://blog.discord.com/add-the-discord-widget-to-your-site-d45ffcd718c6) right?

[Tusky]

The poll is related to chat box you see on this page https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php



I was referring to Discord because it is a place people can chat, I didn't mean adding the integration or anything like that at this point. We could always have a look at that in future, but this poll is just about our existing chat.

[Jubal]

Regarding the Discord possibility, I tend to be pretty nervous of social media integrations - our experience of them in the past is that if they're not *super* well maintained, they're often a security vulnerability, and that's a headache I don't feel like I want to risk atm.

But yeah, this was a discussion about the native chat feature, which as noted is a bit... dried up, at the moment.

A further thing we might want to think about is whether there should be any other top of the index thing to replace it, possibly showing latest posts, or maybe like a cool visual representation of the site somehow, I dunno. Possibly if we're getting rid of it we should just do that then think later if there's something else we might want.

[Mars]

In relation to Discord, I believe the Widget either shows you the number of people online (with a button to join the Discord server) or to show you which users are online (as well as rank) if you wanted to give a more public view.


In regards to the Chatbox, I would have assumed that itself would have been a security risk as although I have not dabbled in SMF for quite some time, if I recall it is likely a third-party addon which like something like Wordpress would need to be constantly updated, or hopefully not had the addon hijacked / sold on.


Edit: Noting that it appears to be using https://custom.simplemachines.org/index.php?mod=1295 that's nearly 5 years of no updates on the free version.

[Jubal]

Sure, I think things that plug an external source of inputs/data in tend to be more prone to security holes than mods where everything runs natively though, just from experience. But yeah, I'm going to do some more looking into whether we can usefully do more with the Discord sometime soon.

[Jubal]

This seems fairly convincing by lack of calls to the contrary position.

[Tusky]

Yeah, looks that way!