Let's take a stroll down memory lane and see how the chat system has evolved over the years.

The initial chat feature was built 10 years ago and used websockets to send text messages. The message history wasn't even saved in this first iteration and it was limited to 2 users.

This first version was built using popup windows. In 2014 a separate page for chats was built in https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/1788

In 2015 group chats were introduced allowing more than 2 users. https://community.nodebb.org/topic/7289/group-chat-changes

After this the chat page didn't see any drastic changes, the design stayed mostly the same until we released 3.0.0 with Harmony theme.

Even though we allowed group chats since 2015 the way it was built wasn't scalable to lots of users. It was meant to be used to create chats between a small number of users. Adding thousands of users to a single room would make it really slow due to how the data was stored and delivered to each user. Without going into too much detail; the previous system would naively try to deliver a new message to all users in the room even if they weren't online.

The upcoming 3.3.0 release will add support for public group chats and allow bigger rooms. :confetti_ball:

Administrators will be able to create public chat rooms and select which groups can access them. If you select registered-users it would be accessible to everyone who registers to your forum.

Public rooms allow users to view the entire chat history unlike private rooms where you only see messages sent after you have joined.

You can test by going to https://community.nodebb.org/chats.Hopefully you won't see our admin chats :laughing:

This feature is on the develop branch for anyone wanting to test it on their dev forums.

Happy chatting :left_speech_bubble: