[Show HN] An experiment - Group Chat from just a URL

http://groups.gaglers.com/

by ad93611 • 13 years ago

31 52 13 years ago

groups.gaglers.com

jmathai2• 13 years ago

Looks great. I've seen similar projects and I think these disposable group chats are very powerful.

My biggest problem is that I never remember them for when I need them and resort to group chats. Often that's "good enough" but for when everyone isn't on the same network something like this would be nice. Again, the hardest part is thinking about the service when I need it.

A feature request would be file attachments. It's 2013 and attaching a file in a chat is still extremely painful and rarely works.

ad936119• 13 years ago

Gee, thanks! We were thinking that we'd allow other websites to take a url and embed it within their site or collaborative area. Do you think that will help?

Yeah, I hear you about file attachments :)

grey-area• 13 years ago

A great and simple idea and a service that I think a lot of small companies would actually pay for if you execute it well. The front page of HN will be a good load test...

However I'd also be concerned about security - if you're trying to sell this as a service, you'd need to password protect groups somehow and ideally serve on https. Can't see this on the site right now but presumably you're planning to offer this? Perhaps this is just an experiment, but having no guarantees like this would not reassure me - ideally chats should be namespaced too so that there are no issues with collisions of chat room names.

There's no way I'd type anything useful into a chat like this without basic security in place and being reassured about how the data was stored and deleted. Chats are just too prone to leaking information because they're so informal, so it's even more important than email in a way. In fact I'd probably prefer to buy the software and run it on my server to be sure about that if actually using it.

arethuza• 13 years ago

Could you allow verbatim text for code as well?

Keep up the good work - it really is pretty engaging at the moment.

jmathai2• 13 years ago

Embedding it within a site isn't as useful for me, personally. Possibly for others.

Perhaps the ability to pay for a permanent URL (or chat room ID) so a team can bookmark it for times when they need to chat. Or a URL I can easily send to someone without having to always "register" a new one.

I can see that being part of a paid tier (along with TLD mapping, UI customization, etc).

bevenky• 13 years ago

If I could use this for our support chat with my customers on a native client, that would be awesome too..

ad936119• 13 years ago

We are experimenting with some like that. We'll be glad to work with you on this.

thejosh• 13 years ago

Keep getting:

Failed! "rexasdsfed" may exist, try another name

MichaelApproved• 13 years ago

I was surprised by what names were already taken. Seemed like there was a bug in the name check rather than the name actually being taken.

ad936119• 13 years ago

this is a bug! We are looking into it

charliesome2• 13 years ago

> "Profanity detected. Message cannot be sent"

Seriously?

ad936119• 13 years ago

Yeah, there is a simple trie that checks for common profanity words. I'm sure we can improve it. :)

charliesome2• 13 years ago

Couple questions:

* Why bother using a trie?

* Why bother filtering profanity?

blackhole• 13 years ago

I would love to use this service, but I demand the freedom to bitch and moan to my friends using whatever cuss words I fucking feel like.

veeti• 13 years ago

You can improve it by getting rid of it.

mmahemoff• 13 years ago

Given that it's private chat, there's really no need to censor it. Anyone using it has been invited. (Just to add to the chorus.)

ndr• 13 years ago

How does that work?

"non ne ho idea" (Italian for "I have no idea") triggers the filter, which is a non sense.

robinduckett• 13 years ago

These things pop up about every six months. Some have a USP, others like this one, don't.

crucio• 13 years ago

If you're going to give people a unique URL to give out, then can we have non unique group names? I couldn't find a relevant group name that wasn't already taken, so resorted to mashing the keyboard

lancefisher• 13 years ago

  > Failed! "test" may exist, try another name
  > Failed! "another name" may exist, try another name
  > Failed! "i just did" may exist, try another name

Hortinstein2• 13 years ago

but apparently touchme wasn't taken!

jameskennemore• 13 years ago

http://groups.gaglers.com/r/EM3m/

mtrimpe• 13 years ago

I'd also make the identifiers non-guessable.

I'm having quite a nice conversation with kokpo at the moment but I don't think he meant to invite me ;)

guynamedloren• 13 years ago

I tried 5 random names (each more complex and more unique than the last) and each one failed...

polack• 13 years ago

Tried to create groups with non-us character in it (ö) and get the following message:

Page unavailable Sorry, but the requested page is unavailable due to a server hiccup. Our engineers have been notified, so check back later.

racbart• 13 years ago

  Failed! "sdf" may exist, try another name
  Failed! "sdkjfhjkshf" may exist, try another name
  Failed! "kjht7y248i23uh" may exist, try another name

Great minds think alike, right? (edit: formatting)

Hortinstein2• 13 years ago

this is cool, any possibility of the source showing up on github?

Pyramids• 13 years ago

One issue I noticed immediately, if you resize the window while in chat, the input box overlaps the chat.

hardik988• 13 years ago

What do you mean by "may exist"?

     Failed! "asdjoiqndiqnw09d21eh09n20dnqdqddqw" may exist, try another name

Are you using a bloom filter or something?

eksith• 13 years ago

Same here. For a moment, I thought my imagination was insufficient. Then I remembered I tied my imagination to /dev/random

netrus• 13 years ago

My guess would be they spread random false positives for privacy reasons?

lambda2• 13 years ago

Or a hash with not enough bits to avoid collisions, and no chaining.

globalpanic• 13 years ago

typed in three choices of group name: one a dictionary word, another a university module code, the last a random selection of about 20+ letters. All three choices returned the same error message - that this group may already exist.

glomph• 13 years ago

https://crypto.cat/ will give you encrypted group chat from a word. But you do have to install an extension.

gizzlon2• 13 years ago

Choosing 'Ø' as my name made the whole thing go blank.. removing the cookies and choosing another name made it work again..

Edit: Great idea btw :)

p4bl0• 13 years ago

Whatever I try to use as group name, "it may already exist":

“Failed! "almzirfmzeurfuerzf" may exist, try another name”

“Failed! "lalalalalalalahello" may exist, try another name”

…

shanelja• 13 years ago

Same issue:

Failed! "this name is clearly not in use due to the random string of characters it ended with ~agsh1das82S~" may exist, try another name

Perhaps the system is overloaded, or they use a dynamically generated unique identifier with each room, such as a short URL of 3-6 characters, if they're numeric only HN and Reddit could probably fill it pretty quickly - but without any more information, this is all guess work.

gizzlon2• 13 years ago

Feature request: The ability to associate an gravatar email address after I've entered a room..

spiritplumber• 13 years ago

I'd like to be able to use this for my telepresence rig. Please let me know if I can license this.

ad936119• 13 years ago

Let us talk. Can you send me a email? My email is in profile.

lambda2• 13 years ago

> Failed! "sodihfoihvocin" may exist, try another name

Hmm. Every name I tried gave me this message. At first I thought it was because I used obvious names that other people had used, like "test" and "foobar", but even the above random string of gibberish failed.

pyxy• 13 years ago

When me and a friend of mine were experimenting in creating a web chat we realized that inserting new messages into the beginning of page (or div) is much better for both users and developers. No bothering with autoscrolling. No user distraction of autoscrolling when he reads previous messages. It was really a good decision.

Anyway IRC is much better. I don't want to live my life in a multitabbed web browser window.

ad936119• 13 years ago

Good idea! thanks.

malditogeek• 13 years ago

Interesting. I've been working on a very similar concept but based on IRC. There's a version running here: http://lalo-g7stltno.dotcloud.com/

Once authenticated with your Twitter account you can join a room using the URL, the path represents a room/channel. The cool thing is that you can also join to that channel using a standard IRC client as well.

The code is here: https://github.com/malditogeek/lalo

ryandvm• 13 years ago

Kudos. Very clean design. I toyed with pretty much the exact same concept a few years ago when I wanted to try out Google's AppEngine:

http://yakeze.appspot.com/nick/hackernews2013/

ad936119• 13 years ago

The bug that caused many group creations to fail is fixed now. Let us know if there are still more issues.

[Show HN] An experiment - Group Chat from just a URL

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