New Hackaday.io Chat Engine

Over the next few days, we're planning on releasing a new version of the Hackaday.io chat engine.

WHY?

Current chat engine has performance and scalability issues, especially with large rooms or users with a large number of conversations.
When we build this initially, we never anticipated for it to get as popular as it did. We have tried patching as much as we can but eventually hit the wall. So a full rewrite was in order.

WHAT CAN I EXPECT?

Right off the bat, the new chat should be a bit faster and should scale better.
A bunch of bugs have been fixed (though I am sure a few new ones have been introduced so bear with us)
We'll be able to support a public, read-only chat (often requested for HackChats)
Adding new features should be easier so feel free to queue up your feature requests/ideas ;)
Most importantly - the core functionality/UX should stay exactly the same, so ideally you won't even notice the change, except for speed.

WHEN?

We're planning on pushing this out in the next couple of days (ETA is Tuesday March 21 2017)
In order to ensure consistency of all data, we'll be having a "maintenance window" (~30 min) during which chat will be disabled. We'll try to target a low-traffic timeframe for this (early morning PST)

Questions? Concerns? Feel free to leave a comment.

UPDATE (March 22 2017 03PM PST) - This feature has just been released to production. Please report if you notice bugs, issues or inconsistencies. Thanks!

Discussions

Yann Guidon / YGDES wrote 03/23/2017 at 15:45

Wow, no more "this script takes too much time to complete" popup message from my browser !
This changes a few things, indeed !

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zakqwy wrote 03/23/2017 at 14:21

tried the new chat and was like 'okay this seems pretty cool', then i tried it on my phone and i was like 'omg supercon '17 game-changer'

well done @Aleksandar

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Aleksandar Bradic wrote 03/23/2017 at 16:21

Awesome! I am just a messenger though. Mad props to @Amar @Ivan @vangithub @jimliu & co. ;)

Are you sure? yes | no

Paulo Alcobia wrote 03/23/2017 at 14:03

I have trouble with the current one, when typing in my iPhone it sometimes eats the last character after submitting. I home the new one fixes this.

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davedarko wrote 03/23/2017 at 13:03

I love the timestamps and date titles/separators - sometimes it's the little things. And also the small vs. big text button - so much easier to understand their function now!

Are you sure? yes | no

davedarko wrote 03/23/2017 at 13:45

Although, it would be great for longer messages to adjust the size of the text area.

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haydn jones wrote 03/22/2017 at 23:01

Do the images timeout on new chat, one changed to show failed to load.

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Yann Guidon / YGDES wrote 03/15/2017 at 01:16

Oh my ! At last ! I can't believe it ! :-)

Are you sure? yes | no

danjovic wrote 03/15/2017 at 00:40

Great news! The chat was too heavy for most of my machines and did not worked at my working place which by instance is behind a proxy

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haydn jones wrote 03/14/2017 at 22:30

Could you block the links to the google form on public chat, we all put our e-mails up, and wouldn't want them collected by the spam bots.

Are you sure? yes | no

Sophi Kravitz wrote 03/14/2017 at 23:04

I'll send the link to the form out in the reminder email

Are you sure? yes | no

Aleksandar Bradic wrote 03/15/2017 at 00:23

Public chat is just something that will be possible with the new engine, but we won't be activating it automatically. We'll have to evaluate all the pros & cons. This one is a great point - it might make more sense to create a new channel that's public only from beginning and leave the Hack Chat private. Thanks!

Are you sure? yes | no

Key Initiatives // Oct 12 2016

Discussions

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