Site chat

Section: Admin → Community → Chat. The module is off until you turn it on (Add-ons → Modules), and the chat itself lives at /chat. It does not appear in the site menu by itself: add a link or a block.

Getting started

1. Turn on the “Site chat” module and open Chat → Rooms.
2. Create a room: a title, an address (Latin letters, digits, hyphen) and, if you like, “roles only”, “read only” or slow mode.
3. Give people the link /chat/address or put the block {block:chat.box room=address limit=5} on a page — the latest messages and “Open the chat”.
4. With a single room, /chat leads straight into it.

Who can do what

• Read: signed-in people — any room open to them; guests — only if “Guests can read the chat” is on in the settings and the room is marked “guests read” (rooms limited to roles are never shown to guests).
• Write: only signed-in people with a confirmed email who are not banned or muted and whose account is older than the set time (10 minutes by default — protection against a wave of new accounts). Moderators are not bound by that time or by the limits on links and frequency.
• A “roles only” room: the right is checked on every read and every write, so a role change or a ban takes effect on the very next refresh.
• A “read only” room: only moderators write.

Message rules

A message is one line of up to 500 characters of plain text. Invisible and direction-flipping characters are replaced by a space; more than twelve identical characters in a row and the same message sent again are refused. Ordinary people cannot post links or site addresses; a moderator can, but they do not turn into links. A person waits at least two seconds between messages and may send at most thirty in five minutes; a room has a shared per-minute limit (so a wave of people cannot flood it) and an optional slow mode.

Moderation

• On the room page a moderator gets “Remove” and “Mute for 10 minutes” next to a message; everyone else gets “Report” (the report goes to the common “Reports” with a copy of the text and a link).
• Chat → Bans and mutes: a muted person reads but does not write; a banned one does not write at all; for a time or forever, with a reason. The owner and anyone of moderator rank or higher cannot be touched.
• Chat → Moderation journal: who did what to whom (removed, muted, banned, lifted); the journal holds no message text — only the number and the first 40 characters.
• A room is not deleted but turned off: the history stays, but nobody sees it.

Personal data and storage

A message stores neither the visitor’s address nor their browser data; only the account number is known. History is kept for as many days as the settings say (7 by default) and at most 5000 messages per room; the body of a message removed by a moderator is blanked after a week. In Personal data a person can export their messages and erase them (the text becomes empty and the link to the person is lost).

Two caveats. Messages of a blocked person stop being served, but stay for those who have already opened the room until the page is refreshed. The “Chat” block sits on pages the site caches for guests, so a removed message may stay visible to guests there until the page cache expires (five minutes by default); signed-in people never get cached pages.

Gentle polling

The room page asks the server “what is new” only while the tab is visible and the chat is on screen; in quiet times the interval grows from 4 to 30 seconds; of several tabs in one browser only one asks, the others get the answer from it; when there is nothing new the server replies with an empty code 204. A room’s feed is shared by all readers and kept for a couple of seconds, so the load hardly grows with the number of people. Guests have a separate request limit; when exceeded they get “please wait” and lengthen the interval themselves.

Settings

Settings → Chat: guests read (off), show the name instead of the login (off), account age to write (10 minutes), history length (7 days), room message limit (60 per minute), guest poll limit (120 per minute per room), poll cache (2 seconds).