Private messaging in online communities is one of the key features to add a social layer for personal conversations and enable members to build stronger networks.
Private messaging in Tribe communities
The Messages app in Tribe offers a real-time and chat-like experience to the members for a private conversation. Once enabled, the messaging icon will appear right next to the notification bell. Members can also initiate a conversation by directly clicking on the "Message" button from a member profile.
Admins can decide to enable or disable the messages app for their community.
Learn more about Messages
Upcoming enhancements
Given below are a list of enhancements for the Messages app that will be released in the following updates:
- Report a conversation or message
- Email notification and slack integration
- Block/unblock a user from sending messages
- Send images as messages
- Attach files to messages
- Displaying link thumbnails
- Group messages
- Real-time "typing" state when a member is typing
- Global status indicator (online, offline, custom)
- Better privacy settings to enable or disable message requests
- Archive conversations
- Admin analytics
- Read receipts
We are very excited to release the first version of messaging app as this has been one of the most popular requests of our tribe community owners. Feel free to share your thoughts, request for an enhancement or report concerns.
Good news every day, and we are all thrilled
Haha 😀
Great
😁 That's good!
@Soheil
@Soheil is there a timeframe when the new updates are coming?
In the messages it displays the Tribe logo, Is this a bug?
@GO Technologies This will be replaced with the community logo very soon.
I think, replaced. But Clicking on community logo does not work for community home page until you click on arrow at left.
@Saleem @GO Technologies It's already fixed and will be live very soon.
You guys are amazing!
Wonderfull. Thank you very much!
I am SOOOOO happy this came out! I have been waiting for a long time too. I was literally screaming out loud during online classes because I was that happy!
Now I am hoping for the image/file attachment feature to roll out. But I can be patient for now...
Thank you Tribe. We love you 💖💛💙🤍🖤
Can we add emojis and gifs to the product backlog pleeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaase???
@Fantastic Thinking
@Fantastic Thinking For emojis/gifs we need to find the best way to implement them everywhere and not only the chat. Most likely, it won't make it to Tribe V1, but I'm going to keep you posted.
when will tribe v2 come out?
Thank you so much for adding this feature. Seeing it in the app store made be very happy! Using it made me happier! 💃
This is great news, our community members have been asking for this too!
I have a question, though: will it be possible to block members from messaging community admins/moderators/our own company employees?
@Inês Batata The way we see it is to give the ability to each member to pick if they want to let others send them private messages or not. Being able to block other members is something that will come as well.
I'm not sure if above will resolve what you're pointing at though. Could you please explain your use-case a little bit more?
Hi @Siavash !
Yes, basically we are worried that our community members will start messaging our Community Managers, Moderators and our employees in the Community.
For community Managers and Moderators it would just be unfeasible and distracting to respond to so many requests (and it's not the proper channel of communication we want them to have with us anyway).
For our "regular" employees the case is that they all have an account in our community and are identified with a badge that they work there, but they're not active in the community at all or maybe sometimes just a fraction of time for specific situations, because their job doesn't require it. Which means they wouldn't see the notifications for new messages in the notification bell and the customers would feel ignored. (In this case it's actually good that no email notifications get generated, because they would only annoy these employees - sometimes users try to reach out to our people directly as a workaround to using the Community or Customer Support and we have to redirect then to the proper communication channel. They even message us on LinkedIn sometimes ;) ).
Hope that wasn't too convoluted of an explanation.
Got the use case! I think in this case, giving an option to users to pick if they want to receive messages or not should work fine.
After it's released, you need to ask them to change the setting on their side. I know this might be a little different from what you were hoping for but in the end the end users should have control over it. For instance, maybe one of your employees actually want to receive messages.
Hi @Siavash, I have a similar question, but a different use case. As I have already mentioned in my post (https://community.tribe.so/post/5f345252a0ff7762a258e9d7), it is very important for us to protect minors in our community. This includes that we do not want to give them the opportunity to be contacted privately by others. In this case it would be very helpful if we as admins could switch off this function for certain members (minors). Are you working on something like that?
When is it possible to have the option to either open in a new tab, or like Facebook have the smaller chats show up in the bottom so it can be a smooth integration within the community?
Currently, it opens over the page we are currently on.
@Steve Allen That's a very good suggestion. Let us discuss it with the product team.
Is there API Endpoint for messages?
Definitely, we'll release the API documentation. The reason we haven't released it yet is that we're improving the Messages API every single day as we speak.
We'll be releasing the documentation as soon as the endpoints are stable.
How about voice messages??
@Wan That's a great suggestion. However, at this point, it's not the priority yet. We'll make it better and better as we move forward.
Thank you, we were also waiting for this feature to be added. We would like to report a minor bug. The language of our site is Turkish, but the message part is English. Language option does not affect this section. Css codes did not affect either. We tried to fix it with css codes.
Have the same problem for the CSS. Everything is bright white, plus when you exit the messaging window, it reloads the page unlike what every other thing on the tribe network does
You're absolutely right. The language part will be coming up next. Regarding the CSS, it will take a little bit of time but we have it on our list.
@Siavash We are super excited to launch the messages feature in our community. Since our community is in German, I wanted to ask if there is any update on when the German version of messages will be released?
@Soheil when will "Better privacy settings to enable or disable message requests" be available?
This is great news.. What i would love to see for best UX would be that it opens as a side bar. and also its really helpful to have them show up as mini chats in the lower part of the screen too..
with also the option of showing all in one screen if you choose.
See image above for the facebook works which i feel works really well. and it is simple.
@Steve Allen We're definitely considering this suggestion. We're just figuring out if it should be part of the current version of Tribe or the next one.
You Guys so amazing! Congrats and Thank you.
Also another suggestion would be to have the same profile image and notifications in the top right corner, when in private messenger rose to, so it feels like its all part of the same page and navigation.
Hi @Steve Allen
This is a valid point and something we are aware of.
Since all of a new component are being built with version 2.0 in mind, hence we will experience some inconsistency with current version.
Moderation and Chat are part of version 2.0 and you would be able to tell the difference I guess. As everything becomes more mature and version 2.0 will be released, it all comes together.
thanks for the reply :)
I have a question about how these messages are encrypted. I do not seem to have access to the messages so it would seem they are but maybe could comment on this aspect.
Hey @Doug Davis. At this stage, when the messages are being sent to our servers and move between servers they're all encrypted. But we're not encrypting them at rest, meaning that on our database the messages are saved unencrypted.
There are a few things we are investigating before making any decisions regarding encryption. The purpose of Tribe is a little bit different from messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram. The main difference is that the moderation and privacy policy of each community is maintained by the community admins. For this reason, we need to figure out if the admin of the community should have access to messages sent by users or not and there is a thin line between a good and bad decision there.
For instance, platforms such as Slack, let team owners export all private messages. On the other hand, platforms like Facebook groups, don't allow group admins to see any of the private messages delivered between group users.
If we want to go the Slack direction, we cannot have end-to-end encryption similar to WhatsApp. Depending on our users' need, we may give the option for messages encryption to community admins as well but we haven't made a decision yet.
What are your thoughts?
great
This is great. One suggestion, if it hasn't been made yet, this potentially can be a source of headache for admins/moderators getting messages from users that are support requests. So it would be nice if admins/moderators had an option to disable messages for their accounts with a message that says "If you're looking for support, please contact us at.... ".
Yes this is considered in the future updates of the messages app.
The feature is great. But...
Like most chat applications, they could have a system for emojis if you are on a PC. Any chance you'll add that?