Threads

[pnewell]

Is there a thread package available that works like Flowdock has that allows people to reply to certain messages and group them?

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[geekgonecrazy]

@pnewell currently there aren't threads. By nature chat is going to be with out threads. This could be tricky to implement. And do we really want to convert real time chat into a forum style?

[gmsecrieru]

+1 for @geekgonecrazy

[pnewell]

If you make a demo at Flowdock, you can see how they implemented it. It is really smart. It doesn't make it a forum per say, it is just a way to group conversations within conversations.

For our case, we work in support, and there is a constant flow of questions coming in to confirm our products features among reps. So sometimes we have questions and answers coming in at the same time, and it becomes hard to keep track of what answer is related to what question.

Flowdock allows you to reply directly to another message, so the flow of the chat looks the same as rocketchat, but messages that are related show different colored dots next to them so people can track which chat is replying to which chat.

[pnewell]

Of course in this example, I am having a conversation with myself lol

[geekgonecrazy]

@pnewell Interesting.. So it doesn't actually group them inline. Just indicates which post its in reply to?

[pnewell]

So if you click on the little colored icon, it takes you to a page with just the messages in that thread. That part of it is not as important to us, but not bad to have either.

[jots]

I like this idea. what is the UI for choosing if you are starting a new thread or replying to an existing? hopefully there is a way to do it via keyboard, i.e. hit ctrl-R before entering text and it pops up a list of recent threads to choose from, otherwise it is a new thread?

[pnewell]

You can sign up for a free account here:
https://www.flowdock.com/

No credit card needed and you can play around with it. To answer your question, every message has an icon that appears when you mouse over next to it that you can click to directly reply to it.

If you don't click this when making a new message, it will start a new "thread"

[timokorkalainen]

Indeed threads are the reason why I very much prefer Flowdock over any other chat platform. They really, really make any longer discussions much easier to grasp: properly used threads allow users to be aware of the context of any message without the use of hashtags or other explanations. This is also why they suit organisational discussions so well, where looking back at the discussions later on is much more common than in everyday chit chat.

Perhaps a simple way to at least test out the threading feature could be to just add a field to the message model that contains the id of the message that started the thread. Then all the messages in a thread could be displayed by selecting messages with the same "thread field" value and order them with time stamp.

[Somantiq]

Zulip does it right imo. Look at this screenshot https://blog.okturtles.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/zulip-screenshot-preview.jpg taken from here https://blog.okturtles.com/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-alternatives/

It is still the simple chat I love but you can easily see which context (e.g. "thread") each message is posted in, and see it grouped where it makes sense. Especially for integrations with other apps I think this is a killer feature. We use Slack at work currently (I tried to push RocketChat ;-) but lost) and I can tell you it gets messy fast.

Also I believe the archived messages will one day be a treasure trove once we have a usable AI, and the threads give each message a semantic context - priceless.

[ProdigyMaster]

@Somantiq @pnewell +1

[honnel]

@Somantiq @pnewell +1