Threads

[pnewell]

Is there a thread package available that works like Flowdock has that allows people to reply to certain messages and group them?

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[geekgonecrazy]

@pnewell currently there aren't threads. By nature chat is going to be with out threads. This could be tricky to implement. And do we really want to convert real time chat into a forum style?

[gmsecrieru]

+1 for @geekgonecrazy

[pnewell]

If you make a demo at Flowdock, you can see how they implemented it. It is really smart. It doesn't make it a forum per say, it is just a way to group conversations within conversations.

For our case, we work in support, and there is a constant flow of questions coming in to confirm our products features among reps. So sometimes we have questions and answers coming in at the same time, and it becomes hard to keep track of what answer is related to what question.

Flowdock allows you to reply directly to another message, so the flow of the chat looks the same as rocketchat, but messages that are related show different colored dots next to them so people can track which chat is replying to which chat.

[pnewell]

Of course in this example, I am having a conversation with myself lol

[geekgonecrazy]

@pnewell Interesting.. So it doesn't actually group them inline. Just indicates which post its in reply to?

[pnewell]

So if you click on the little colored icon, it takes you to a page with just the messages in that thread. That part of it is not as important to us, but not bad to have either.

[jots]

I like this idea. what is the UI for choosing if you are starting a new thread or replying to an existing? hopefully there is a way to do it via keyboard, i.e. hit ctrl-R before entering text and it pops up a list of recent threads to choose from, otherwise it is a new thread?

[pnewell]

You can sign up for a free account here:
https://www.flowdock.com/

No credit card needed and you can play around with it. To answer your question, every message has an icon that appears when you mouse over next to it that you can click to directly reply to it.

If you don't click this when making a new message, it will start a new "thread"

[timokorkalainen]

Indeed threads are the reason why I very much prefer Flowdock over any other chat platform. They really, really make any longer discussions much easier to grasp: properly used threads allow users to be aware of the context of any message without the use of hashtags or other explanations. This is also why they suit organisational discussions so well, where looking back at the discussions later on is much more common than in everyday chit chat.

Perhaps a simple way to at least test out the threading feature could be to just add a field to the message model that contains the id of the message that started the thread. Then all the messages in a thread could be displayed by selecting messages with the same "thread field" value and order them with time stamp.

[Somantiq]

Zulip does it right imo. Look at this screenshot https://blog.okturtles.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/zulip-screenshot-preview.jpg taken from here https://blog.okturtles.com/2015/11/five-open-source-slack-alternatives/

It is still the simple chat I love but you can easily see which context (e.g. "thread") each message is posted in, and see it grouped where it makes sense. Especially for integrations with other apps I think this is a killer feature. We use Slack at work currently (I tried to push RocketChat ;-) but lost) and I can tell you it gets messy fast.

Also I believe the archived messages will one day be a treasure trove once we have a usable AI, and the threads give each message a semantic context - priceless.

[ProdigyMaster]

@Somantiq @pnewell +1

[honnel]

@Somantiq @pnewell +1

[mateuszszulc]

+1 from our perspective this is really a killer feature which every web-based communication tool must have.

[bb010g]

Telegram's take on replies is pretty good. It doesn't stick threads in separate sections, but sticks a preview of the message above the reply that you can click on and go back to, along with overlaying a button to return. It keeps the linear ordering but allows for easy following of concurrent conversations.

[ywecur]

Anybody got any ideas about how to implement this? I'd love to help but I don't know where to start.

[ulope]

Zulip's "topics" (I believe thats what they call them) and their Dashboard stream are the features I miss very much after switching to Rocket. They make it very easy to have lightweight grouping of messages within a channel without adding much noise or overhead

[jmatsushita]

+1 for threads!

[Charuru]

Mattermost has this implemented well too.

[vikaskedia]

+1 for threads

+1 for mattermost implmentation

I would be happy to write code to implement this,

[rchikballapur]

+1 for threads too!

[geekgonecrazy]

@vikaskedia we take pull requests 😄 feel free to take a crack at it! 👍

[hwinkel]

👍

[chihoko]

This really is a core feature that is enticing our users towards Mattermost, their implementation is excellent.

[DreadKnight]

There's another free open source chat that I kinda like which does it like Flowdock from what I can tell (never used Flowdock myself, but checked the previous comments), hopefully it will help a bit: http://scrollback.io

[hvma]

+1 for threads. implement and you will get higherED institutions on board - hurry before they give in to Slack or Mattermost :)

[sgohl]

I just deployed an instance with the image docker.io/rocketchat/rocket.chat:1.0.0-beta.2

As for the thread not being a sidebar, but a channel of the type "Thread" is absolutely ok for me.

It was just not obvious to me that there is a newer release which has this feature implemented 👍

Edit: Dumb question, but how do I know when this feature is available in the :latest docker image so I can switch back to stable?

[pshute]

"But I say, I assume the Slack team invested much time to try out which kind of implementation works best for most. And I never heard someone say the Slack implementation wouldn't be sufficient."

@Port22, my team moved to Rocket.chat from Slack soon after threads were introduced. They were too useful to not use, but were causing problems. Eg someone would reply as a thread, and then some of the team would participate in the thread, others wouldn't even realise it was there, and would continue the discussion as normal replies. I would tick the box to post a copy of a thread reply to the channel to help alert them to the thread, but that creates clutter.

We'll have to try this implementation to see how it works out, but I'm not hopeful. I would really like to try the Flowdock style as a compromise. Even better to be able to swap between styles.

[reetp]

Edit: Dumb question, but how do I know when this feature is available in the :latest docker image so I can switch back to stable?

Short answer - when it is released.

Watch the releases/tags https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/tags - you can write yourself a little script to check for updates. It's very simple to do.

Note there may be several Beta and RC releases and it may take weeks, or even months.

So you should really have deployed a test version first.

[Centzilius]

I just wanted to add that the threading support in #13541 does not work with the internal SlackBridge. Threads in Slack are still transported without any indication that there is a thread and threads in rocketchat are not transported at all

[engelgabriel]

We have decided that was better to delay our v1 release and get the Threads done properly than get the feature out the way it was initially implemented on the develop branch. We have "rebranded" our current implementation of Threads to Discussions (was it creates a new room type) and will implement Threads exactly the same way as Slack does.

In our vision there are 2 different use cases on how to break out of the main conversation: one very easy and organic, with a single click for small side talk, and other, much more structured, that creates a new conversation with its own life cycle.

We have tried to have a single solution for both, and as a result, no one was happy with it.
So we have given up on having a single approach for both use cases and will implement both: the Slack-like industry standard and our brand new one, called Discussions.

#13843

[pshute]

@engelgabriel can you please clarify how threads and discussions will differ? Are they just different representations of the same underlying data?

[engelgabriel]

Are they just different representations of the same underlying data?

No, totally different data models.

• Discussions = new channels that inherit permission from the parent channel
• Threads = same channel will be like the reply action we have now, but add the parent message property to the messages, so they can be displayed on the sidebar.

[nemhods]

Hey all, appreciate the delay to improve the implementation. Is it planned to have these features toggleable? e.g. turn on only threads but not discussions?

It's a great power user feature to have both, but I can see this confusing the hell out of our users, especially if the mobile applications would take a few months or so to catch up.

[engelgabriel]

Both these features will be toggleable.

[pshute]

No, totally different data models.

@engelgabriel thanks. Can I please request that a Flowdock style display be considered for Threads in addition to Slack style? I think it should be easier to do than Slack style because they're displayed with the other messages in chronological order, just coloured to identify each thread's messages.

[Edit: should be able to toggle between Slack style and Flowdock style.]

[khaledalyawad]

Guys I raised another PR of slack like threading #13805

[HelenS93]

Hello!
Do you have API to post a message as "reply in thread" or "Quote"?

[sampaiodiego]

you can use chat.sendMessage and set the tmid property as the message you want to reply in a thread.

[epugh]

I miss the Flowdock ability to take a message that I posted and after the fact rethread it back onto a existing thread.. Any way to do that in Rocket.Chat?

[pshute]

I miss the Flowdock ability to take a message that I posted and after the fact rethread it back onto a existing thread.. Any way to do that in Rocket.Chat?

I'm interested in this too. Being able to thread is only part of the problem. There will always be misthreaded messages to deal with.