Introducing Messages 💬

Haha 😀

Great

😁 That's good!

@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.

@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?

@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?

@Steve Allen That's a very good suggestion. Let us discuss it with the product team. 

Seconded! The second tab is very disruptive.

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.

@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.

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?

@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.

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 :) 

When will version 2.0 come out ? 

I hope really soon , can't wait to have it ! Moderation of chat groups and file sharing in private chats are a plus feature to have in our groups ! It will be great ! Thanks 

Hi Marco. Your question is already answered here. 

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?

Leaving that decision regarding end-to-end encryption up to the preference of the admins seems like a great path forward. Some communities, like a client of mine who provides behavioral and addiction recovery coaching would need end-to-end encryption to provide the users the privacy needed in a community like that (but also with the ability to flag a user for spam or inappropriate messages). I think end-to-end encryption would be my preference in most situations. I don't want my users to ever think I'm spying on their messages.

In other communities, I can imagine situations where admin access to messages might actually be important though, especially if a community allows for participation of minors.

Anyway, if you had to choose one or the other, I'd choose encryption. But, it'd be awesome to have both options.

Yes this is considered in the future updates of the messages app.

Thanks for the suggestions. Most likely, the popup like chat boxes and group chat will not make it to our Tribe V1. But we've written them as a requirement for Tribe V2.

Regarding the third item. Tribe Messages is already realtime!

We've already taken note of adding Emojis to chat and other editors. Thanks for the suggestion.

No problemo!