Chat
A chat launcher on every page of your community. Members message each other privately, join public rooms, or start invite-only rooms of their own — without leaving the page they were reading.
It runs on your own server, over your own WebSocket. There is no third-party chat service in the loop, no per-message pricing, and no monthly bill that grows with your community.
What members get
- A launcher that is always there. Bottom corner of every page, with an unread count. Open it and their conversations and rooms are right there.
- Private messages. One to one, with history. Start one from the list of who is online.
- Public rooms. You create these in the AdminCP and choose which groups may enter.
- Private rooms. Invite-only, owned by whoever made them. Give a group permission to create their own, or keep it to staff.
- Typing indicators, so a conversation has a rhythm rather than a series of surprises.
- Images and files. Pictures appear inline; documents arrive as a labelled link.
- It works on a phone. The floating window becomes a full-screen panel rather than a postage stamp.
What you get
- Per-group permissions. Who can use chat at all, and who can create rooms. Off for every group until you say otherwise.
- Moderation. A "Can moderate chat" permission that reaches every room, including private ones. Delete anything, mute anyone.
- Room owners manage their own. Invite, remove and mute inside a room they created — and nothing outside it.
- Attachments live where your files live. S3, R2, Backblaze, FTP, or local disk. Whatever you have already configured.
- Core's ignore list is honoured, in both directions.
- Members browsing anonymously are never listed. They asked not to be seen.
Private by construction
Every channel a browser is allowed to listen on is decided by your server and cryptographically signed. The WebSocket gateway verifies that signature and knows nothing about rooms or permissions — so there is only ever one copy of the rules.
That applies to public rooms as much as private ones. It would be simpler to let the gateway wave through anything that looks like a room, but the same shortcut would wave through a private room to anybody who guessed a number. It does not.
Requirements
- Invision Community 5
- Realtime, installed and connected, with its gateway deployed
Audio and video
Voice and video calling is a separate add-on, sold on its own or bundled with this. Chat ships the extension points it needs, so installing the add-on makes a call button appear — and not installing it leaves no trace of a missing feature.
What's New in Version 1.0.3
Released
Chat on a phone. Four fixes, all of them things you would only meet on a real handset.
The chat button covered your navigation
Invision Community pins a navigation bar to the bottom of the screen on phones, and the chat button sat on top of its first item — so tapping that item opened chat instead. The button now lifts itself above whatever your theme pins there, measured at the time rather than assumed, so it works the same on a custom theme with a taller bar or no bar at all.
A room took over the whole screen, and the close button was tiny
Opening a room filled the display edge to edge with no sign there was a page behind it, and the × to leave measured 13 by 18 pixels — under half the size a finger reliably hits. Between the two it was easy to feel stuck in a room you had only meant to glance at.
A conversation is now a sheet with the page visible above it, and tapping that strip closes it. Every control in the header and the composer meets the 44-pixel minimum.
The box you type in could sit behind the browser
The window was sized to the full height of the page, which on a phone means the height with the address bar scrolled away. The last ninety-odd pixels — the composer — were behind the browser's own chrome, and behind the keyboard once it opened. It now follows the visible area, keyboard included, and leaves room for the home indicator on a gesture phone.
The people list stayed empty
Not a code fault, but worth knowing about, because you cannot discover it on your own: administrators can always use chat, whether or not any group has been granted access. So on a fresh install chat works perfectly for you and is switched off for everybody else, and the only symptom is a list of people that stays empty while members are demonstrably online.
The settings screen now says so plainly when no group has been granted access, and points at where to grant it. If your people list has ever looked empty, that is almost certainly why — check Members → Groups → (group) → Chat.
Nothing on the desktop layout has changed.
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