alagu/hummingbird

Future Plans?

Closed this issue · 5 comments

flashtopia commented

Any plans to add the following:

Multiple Support Agents.
Transferring Chats
Transcripts
Variables where visitor information can be pre populated into a chat, or pulled from it.

PS> THANK YOU FOR THIS. HATE HOW OLARK & OTHERS ARE RIP OFFS!

alagu commented

Hey @flashtopia

Thanks for the info. These are interesting features. Here is the feature order:

  1. ACL
  2. User location info
  3. Transcripts
  4. Multiple support agents.
  5. User variables.

Thanks for the appreciation. Btw, Olark is not a rip-off. Olark is an amazing product - just that I felt there should be an opensource alternative to it.

flashtopia commented

You are correct, But I am sure they will come after you and have the repo renamed at a minimum.
What they should do is offer a free account and then charge for more than x users.
Their pricing is a rip off for startups where every penny counts.

I will keep watching this. Let me know if you need any support.
Might consider reaching out to Justin Dorfman at MaxCDN. They love small open source projects such as this.
Can probably CDN host the JS scripts for you.

alagu commented

Yes, I'm looking to rename the repository to converse.

Olark does have a free plan. Yes, their pricing is quite heavy beyond that.

Wonderful that MaxCDN wants to host it. But to make lot of people use this - it should be easier to deploy a Jabber instance like how you deploy to heroku. Do you know of any?

flashtopia commented

Free plan is BUNK. Does not include SSL.

You should reach out the good folks at ToogleBox.com . They do cloud hosting on the CHEAP compared to Azure / AWS. Again might have another sponsor for the project. I assume everyone could simply share a jabber server but use full domain names logins. Its almost wasteful to deploy jabber for a small amount of users. What would be neat is to have the this project as two options. (1 deploy on your own server / git / bash scripts) (2 deploy on community server / donation or sponsors).

Another thing i have often wondered about is why use Jabber when WebSockets is probably better? Is it because of clients such as pidgin? Dumping Jabber would probably mean writing an html5 client. But I think its the way of the future. I have often wondered when sebsockets is going to replace XMPP / IMAP / and ActiveSync. Soon i hope.

In my attempt to build a similar script I was able to use PubNub.com to get chat going quickly. Never got around to building rooms or anything like that. Id be interested to hear your thoughts on the Jabber vs HTML5 socket

alagu commented

Thanks for info about togglebox.com.

I am also trying to see how to exclude the whole Jabber stuff in between. Getting up jabber server running is a huge pain and it increases friction in rolling out your own deployment. ejabberd was a huge pain to setup.

In my ideal world, this is how I want chat embeds to happen:

$ git clone git@github.com:alagu/hummingbird.git
$ cd hummingbird;
$ vim config.yml

--
/* Edit configuration */
admin: alagu@alagu.net
--

$ heroku create .
$ git push heroku master

Open the heroku instance in browser, copy scripts to embed the chat box, 
paste it in your own system.

Unknown part: Configure your Adium/Pidgin to talk to heroku servers.

The only reason for using is because of pidgin/adium like clients. I am still trying to figure out if I could run a http server which could act as a BOSH client.

Thanks for informing about the olark rename thing. I renamed by repo to hummingbird 😃