Chat

What we need:

  • Comms for Direct Sponsor recipients to communicate with each other
  • for recipients and sponsors to communicate
  • for clickforafrica users to share links and advice as well as general community discussion
  • A reliable way to communicate with new users (most never get the email replies I send out, especially volunteer devs!). Instead of the contact form, send them to the chat site.
  • Video conferencing for all, but especially so we can do good podcasts
  • Support channels for users of all sites.

What we have

Chatbro

Currently using Telegram for in-page chat which is able to be embedded via a bot into the site. It’s a plug-in and a bot called chatbro which is no longer maintained (2 years). The dev runs it on his own server which is often down, but we could run it ourselves using the open source code on github.

Chatbro docs are here.

Jitsi

For Video chats we have https://meet.jit.si/clickforafrica set up which is a lot easier than hosting it all ourselves. I embedded it in https://clickforcharity.net/jitsi-test/ for now. More about the WP embed in the jitsi page, and more general jitsi info below.

This is new (Oct 2021) but may be useful in the future. (openchat, decentralized blockchain chat.)

Leaving the rest of the stuff I tried out below for reference if we decide to use something else. But Telegram, Jitsi and buddypress will probably do all we need.


Alternatives

nostri.chat looks promising though there is very little documentation at this early stage.

Tried setting up a rocket chat server and it worked fine on a cheap VPS. If Rocket.chat turns out to be troublesome, we could try discord instead. https://discordapp.com/open-source

Some other possibilities to enable video chat in browsers… This may be simpler and people may be more likely to use it, but it would have to work, and many I have read about seem really clunky and bad!

https://github.com/trailofbits/tubertc

Tiny chat might be useful, seems simple but not independent

and this…

matrix 

is a completely decentralized system for  fully distributed chat rooms with no single points of control or failure. But it is not really ready yet.

iflychat.com

Tried, but can’t set up an account because of stupid useless google captcha. Will try again later because the video chat is confirmed as p2p and available in the free version. Also wp plug-in.

Rocket.Chat

looks exactly like Slack and has the same functions, text, audio and video chat, including conferencing – channels, notifications and much more. 
There’s a demo chat you can join here.

chat.clickforafrica.org is our test installation.  Though it is a stand-alone server and not part of any site, it can add a live chat feature to the websites.

There is a WebRTC Troubleshooter we can use too. Seems like there can be problems if participants are remote from each other, or in a group chat, but there is a solution in

jitsi

which is apparently integrated already to rocket chat and easy to activate. It sounds like the video streams are still peer-to-peer although I have not seen or heard it said explicitly (in English at least!).

More search reveals that it is indeed P2P in the video chats and audio, so no worries about bandwidth-hogging the server. (confirmed by the dev)

Some highlights: easy set up on Linux – and the requirements, take a look at VPS-minimal, we’re talking maybe as low as the 2 euro a month VPS, assuming less than 1TB bandwidth. If that turnd out to be insufficient, the $5 digitalocean instance will be plenty.