Thread-based chat

Do you ever feel lost in the maze of messages in a chat ?

Comment

Inspiration

Scratchdown: Hey, what are you guys doing this weekend?
dialexo: Is 2D or 3D better ?
Zyf: I'm playing osu!
coiL: 2D < 3D ofc
coiL: I mean there's LauzHack this weekend right?
Scratchdown: Oh yeah that's great !
dialexo: well I used to agree with you but I accidentally got a 3D gf
Scratchdown: Do you have a team already ?
Corentin: NTO
Zyf: still playing osu!
coiL: not really
coiL: what what do you mean ?
Scratchdown: We need an idea for a project tho
Painguin: noooooooooooooooot
Jostoph: guys I did git add . and everything is broken
dialexo: It's hard to follow what you guys are talking about, if only we had a better chat... unless ???

What it does

This is a production tool to better structure chat discussions for projects. It just takes the best of slack, reddit, emails, and discussions forums into a single tool.

How I built it

react.js, express, node.js, socket.io

Challenges I ran into

Reactive UI frameworks are very different from more traditional procedural UI updates. It was difficult at first to get used to thinking only about state and not modifying the view, but it proved to be far more maintainable.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We built it from scratch while most of us didn't ever do any js/node project before.

What I learned

  • Usage of React.js
  • Usage of socket.io to abstract away real-time updates with channels subscribtions

What's next for Thread-based chat

Thread structure :

  • Link to other threads/messages in messages
  • Allow moving existing messages to a new subthread
  • Create/Add Thread Tags to inform about the content of threads
  • Filter threads by tags and keywords

Information display :

  • Display amount of thread replies
  • Display info on subthreads in message list in thread view
  • Display parent thread for subthread (in the both the thread view header and in the threadlist)
  • Display amount of child threads
  • "not read" marker/tag on Message/Thread

Users :

  • User logins
  • User profiles
  • User avatars

In message features :

  • Emojis
  • Message Emoji Reactions
  • Link auto-formating
  • Link and Image previews

More productivity tools integrated with the chat and threads :

  • project boards
  • accounting tools
  • map of locations referenced in messages and live location of all users on a map ...
Share this project:

Updates