A bunch of stuff has happened since the previous update, which I will attempt to summarise in this post. Some major feature additions, some fixes and updates were added as-per-usual.

These include a wide layout option, improved user profiles and broadcast improvements.

Restoring chat logs

Your chat log will now be saved locally and restored upon loading the room. Since chat is not saved server-side, this avoids losing everything if you refresh.

Pop-up profiles

Gone are the drop-down menus on the user list. Instead, the profile pop-up window now appears instead, along with all the available user actions. The idea behind this was to give easier access to a user's profile, while allowing user actions to be categorised appropriately.

Improved broadcast error feedback

One of the more frustrating and persistent issues I get feedback on is broadcast errors with little to no explanation. I've attempted to remedy this with some more descriptive message feedback. This, I hope, will give some idea of what is going on when errors appear.

However, since some issues may still be somewhat mysterious, I've also added a troubleshooting section to the cam help page. The aim of this is to demystify things a bit, as well as possibly solve some other broadcasting issues you may face.

No Push-to-Talk by default if room is not busy

Push-to-talk was always the default audio broadcast method, unless manually changed. This is now dependant on the number of active broadcasters in a room.

If there are less than 6 broadcasters, and you have not already changed the PTT settings or they're not forced by the room, you will broadcast audio by default. Otherwise, PTT will be enabled. This can still be changed when broadcasting, however.

This aims to reduce some frustrations in smaller, less active rooms, where PTT isn't always the ideal option.

Seek YouTube videos

A popular feature request was the ability to seek through currently playing YouTube videos. It's as simple as it sounds. Just hover over the progress bar and select where to jump to.

Improve dark theme

Dark theme continues to be improved. Now all drop-downs and pop-ups will be appropriately themed and less eye-glaringly bright.

Wide layout

Another requested feature, and something ultimately required, was a way to increase the amount of screen-space given to broadcasts. This was especially apparent on widescreen laptops, where there is very little horizontal space, so broadcasts would be squashed into a very narrow space.

Solving this meant adding an additional layout to move chat and cams adjacent to each other. Currently this is in a test phase, though I plan to make this the default layout mode for wider views in the future.

Some additional fixes and improvements

• Rooms will no longer close if the owner is broadcast-banned
• Trophies on the profile pop-up are now limited to eight
• "conversation restored" message will no longer be spammed when selecting a private conversation
• Unread private messages will now be cleared when interacting with a conversation that is already open
• When gifting support, the beneficiary user's username will now be shown on the payment page
• Tooltips added to interface options
• Avoid sending variable quality streams unless broadcasting in HD (720p +)

Some work in progress and upcoming stuff

Inbox pagination and performance improvements

Offline messaging remains quite slow, and pagination for conversations remains quite broken. Work is in progress to improve this and should fix both of these issues.

Additionally, I'll work on fixing message streams so the latest messages load first, and you load previous messages instead.

Switch cameras on mobile

Browsers are beginning to treat a phone's multiple cameras (front and back) as a single device, meaning only one will appear on the broadcast pop-up. I'm planning to add a means to switch between them either when starting to broadcast or during.

Firstly, apologies for the radio silence recently. Work is still ongoing, though mostly behind the scenes and mostly large and complex tasks which are taking up a large part of my time. Since I’m not expecting a major feature or change to land any time soon, I’ll give you a heads up on what’s currently happening.

Two pieces of work on in progress currently. These are a redesign of how the rooms interact with the media server, and an improvement to the payments system to comply with the new SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) coming into force on the 14th of September this year. Since they both require major rework of integral parts of JumpInChat, I’m spending quite a bit of time on them to make sure as little goes wrong as possible.

Media server

As it currently stands, each room is assigned a media server (one of two at present). All users will automatically join that server and all published broadcasts will pass through it. This works just fine for now, though it doesn’t give much room to scale. If a room suddenly gets a surge of activity it may overload the server, resulting in performance degradation for that room and any other room using it.

Instead, I’m redesigning media server connections to spread users to different servers, regardless of what room they are in room. This will better balance available server capacity, and also allow more servers to have a greater effect should they be required. If a single room is doing far too well, another server act as a relief to all new users joining rather than them being stuck on just the one.

As you might imagine, broadcasting is rather integral to JumpInChat and isn’t something I want to change on a whim. Since this project requires some extensive redesign, as well as additional infrastructure, I’m taking my time to ensure the current feature set works like it does currently.

Payments upgrade

Enabling Multi-factor authentication for payments was always in the backlog of things to do. I have, due to deadlines previously described, given it more importance to make sure that support is still possible. Much like the media server project, this will take a bit of time to complete, as there is many moving parts and a bunch of new considerations. It also involves money that isn’t mine, so care is of the essence.

What will actually change, as far as currently plans go, is the checkout itself will no longer be hosted by myself. Instead, Stripe will provide a hosted checkout which will collect payment and personal information as required. It will additionally handle any bank authentication that is required, something not possible with the currently payment process I have implemented.

What this will mean for new and current supporters will be a new payment page, largely consisting of a button to open the checkout, and possibly a requirement to authenticate currently recurring payments. Though this authentication need only be done once, if at all.

Other small changes

I have updated a few other things given the chance. These were mainly small additions and improvements around support:

• a button to open a gift support page was added to the room chat bar, ala discord. This will allow easier gifting of support to the current room to allow perks such as custom emoji.
• when gifting support, the user you are gifting will be shown on the checkout page.
• fixed site bans, and made them more reliable when users are in multiple rooms

If you want to get more frequent updates and site news, be sure to follow the Twitter or Facebook feeds.

Vivaldi

Some big additions this update, if few in number. Offline messaging, the ability to send messages to users directly within the site, is the start of a wider work to allow socialising between users. Recent rooms allow you to better revisit rooms.

Offline messaging

Part of this years plan to add a wider means of communication to the site is to allow direct messaging between users, outside of chatrooms. Ultimately this will facilitate groups and following users, and more to come.

Offline messaging is the first step in this, which allows users to message each other within the site and outside rooms. It can be useful for users to communicate with moderators, room owners or friends. It also adds an additional means to deliver site updates, or updates to your account.

Additionally, since this does not require a user to divulge personal information or their social media accounts, it allows a more secure method to communicate with others.

Recent room list

Since you may visit several rooms on the site, and since those rooms may not be displayed on the directory there needed to be an additional means to keep track. Thus, your recently visited rooms will now appear on the home page. Up to six registered rooms will appear here, depending on the time you visited them.

Later on, an ability to save favourite rooms will be added as well.

Other fixes and improvements

• Increased the site ban and broadcast ban duration to 48 hours
• Updates to the administration tools to improve efficiency
• Modern browsers can now use up-to-date code, which should also reduce the file size slightly

It’s been a while since my last update, and a good deal of changes were made since then. More profile customisation options, improved moderation and a better chat experience are some of what was worked on in the last month or so.

Custom user icons

A new addition just for subscribers, adding a custom user icon can make for a more personalised chatting experience. These icons replace the heart given to supporters, and can be a static image or an animated gif for that added zazz.

Chat flood protection

Spam is constantly an issue with any public chat. Controlling this is a tricky matter, though a deterrent is flood protection. Sending too many messages in quick succession will cause a flood error, preventing you from sending any more messages. This will end after a few seconds of inactivity.

Additional moderator commands and adjustments

I’ve added two new moderator commands, kick and clear.

Kicking a user essentially just boots them from the room, though they are able to immediately return. It’s uses are mainly as a warning against further misbehaving, removing inactive users or controlling the user list after applying room restrictions (registered user requirements, passwords).

Clearing the chat feed removes all messages for all users. This is useful should a user post something they shouldn’t have, such as personal information about themselves or others.

More defined mod permissions

Additionally, I’ve made moderation permissions slightly more clear. There was always two kinds of moderators, a permanent moderator and an assigned moderator. The former are assigned by the room owner themselves, and can only be unassigned by the room owner. Permanent moderators can also assign other users as moderators. An assigned moderator however, has no ability to assign other moderators and can be unassigned by any other permanent mod.

Previously, differentiation between the two was not possible. I’ve added different icons for the two, with a permanent moderator given a full star, where as an assigned moderator is given a half star.

Ban confirmation and duration

When banning a user via the drop-down menu, you will now see a confirmation pop-up. This serves two purposes, to make sure you wish to ban the person and didn’t hit the button accidentally, and to allow you to choose a duration for the ban. You can set a duration from 1–24 hours, the maximum value being the default.

Banning users after they leave the room

Nefarious users who leave the room before a mod has the chance to ban them is a frustrating thing, which is part of the reason I’ve added a means to do so after they are no longer in the room. All room joins are stored for a maximum duration of 1 hour, allowing them to be banned before you have a chance to hit the button.

Text formatting

To give messages a little more emotion, I’ve added the ability to add simple text formatting. By surrounding your text in formatting codes, you can embolden or italicise part of your message. For example, *bold*and _italics_.

Re-enable private message conversations

Previously, when a user you were in a private conversation with leaves, the conversation will be closed. If they return, a new conversation must be made. I’ve improved this so a returning user’s conversation will be re-opened. Currently this only works for registered users, and does not reload the conversation if you reload the page.

Tab completion for chat commands

Most moderation chat commands require a username or nickname to work, though this would require carefully typing or copy-pasting the name. Instead you can now use TAB to autocomplete a name, much the same as @mentioning a user.

For example, having a room with a user called foo, if you type /ban f then press tab, it will autocomplete the closest match, which in this case should be foo.

Improved share on mobiles

Some mobile browsers have introduced a share API that integrates with the operating system’s share pop-over. I’ve changed the functionality of the share button to open this menu, if possible, instead of simply copy the room’s URL. This makes it possible to share directly to other apps.

If you want to get more frequent updates and site news, be sure to follow the Twitter or Facebook feeds.

Vivaldi

2018 was a big year for JumpInChat. With more traffic then ever before, there was more feedback than ever before too. This ultimately led to a swath of improvements and new additions on all fronts. Site capacity was improved, reliability increased, experience streamlined.

I’d like to take a moment to reflect on what has changed, and what is yet to come in the new year. Thanks to everyone who helped us get to where we are today, those who have donated to the site and those who continue to use it.

Merry Christmas!

Scale

One of the primary focuses this year was to allow for an increased amount of traffic. This resulted in a need to expand the server capabilities, add redundancy and improve reliability. This was made immediately apparent on New Years Day where a sudden surge of people brought the site to it’s knees and almost brought it down altogether.

As it currently stands, this is no longer as big an issue. With multiple chat and media servers the site functions well, even under load. Though all this being said, there is still much to do. The current solution is not fit for the long term, as it is not extensible as it should be. This coming year will, I hope, give me time to improve this.

Supporting the site

Allowing for users to financially support the site is a task I had set quite some time ago. Since I pay out of pocket to fund JumpInChat, I had hoped to offset this by offering users additional features for a small monthly payment.

Early in the year I added the first step towards accepting donations. Via a third-party site, several generous users offered their dollars to keep the site going. While this was somewhat suitable at the time, it did not allow for me to reciprocate these donations.

Later on I added an in-site donation mechanism, allowing users to subscribe to additional features, or offer a single small donation. While the current set of additional features is limited — a pair of fancy profile trophies and a higher-quality broadcast — more features are planned. These include:

• Custom user icons
• Custom room emoji
• Reserved nick names

Room and chat improvements

This year I made far too many changes to list here, but to name a few:

• Emojis
• Dark theme
• Trophies
• Room restrictions
• Video player improvements
• Push notifications

Expect more features, fixes and updates as the new year goes by. My list is long and extensive, though a few major future additions will include:

• Additional moderation commands:
  Kick users out of a room, silence user’s mics and block users from broadcasting. These are some of the additional mod options to be added in the near future.
• More video sources:
  Along with YouTube, play Vimeo videos, Twitch replays and more. All will be added to the playlist and play in the inline video player.
• Ban users after they leave the room.

Age restricted rooms

At JumpInChat, I try not to limit what you can do as much as possible. Some activities, however, require a bit more in the way of verification. To accommodate this, I added the concept of age verification, which allows you to verify your age. This let s you broadcast in age restricted rooms, which are rooms with relaxed restrictions for certain “adult” activities.

Currently there’s not much in the way of allowing these rooms to be publicly advertised, though I intend to add an 18 plus directory in the future.

Reporting

In order to effectively moderate the site, I required the ability for users to report activity that may be considered inappropriate or abusive. This is where reporting comes in. Reporting sends a site moderator (me) a message directly along with chat logs and broadcast screenshots, which lets me immediately act and handle the offending user.

New features in 2019

Along with the improvements to existing features mentioned prior, there’s a few more features I’m planning to add in the new year.

Recent and favourite rooms on the home page

Since not all rooms are made public, finding recently entered rooms is currently purely down to bookmarking the link yourself. To remedy this, I’m looking into adding a list of recently entered rooms, public or otherwise, on the home page.

Additionally, you will be able to add a room to a favourite list. These will also be shown on the home page, with an extended list visible on a separate page. This way you’ll never lose track of your chat rooms!

In-site communication and messaging

A method to send messages to other site users directly, whether they are offline of not. This feature is encompassed within a greater plan to improve the creation of communities within the site, which may also include groups and message boards.

Groups will allow room users to create longer-lasting discussions about room management, events or just general shit-posting. They will either be bound to rooms themselves, or created as site-wide communities to allow for greater discussion about the site itself.

Once again, thanks to all of you who have supported the site, left feedback and continued to use it. You’ve all helped make it what it is today.

Merry Christmas and I hope to see you all in 2019

Vivaldi

While there aren’t a huge amount of feature additions in this update, there is instead a number of fixes and improvements to improve reliability, and to tighten things up a little. Not all the improvements are going to be noticeable, as they will be to administration and behind-the-curtain tools. Nevertheless, it all contributes to the smooth functioning of the site.

Moderators can silence users

As part of the planned additions to room moderation, mods can now silence users for a brief period. Silencing prevents users from sending messages, mainly intended to calm a certain user’s excessive messaging.

Improved trophy application

Occasion-based trophies are only applicable on the date of the occasion in question, naturally. However, since users could be from all over the world, there should be some leeway as to when they can be given.

Relying on a time given by the user themselves is somewhat unreliable. Instead, trophies will be applied as long as the date is correct somewhere in the world.

Media server re-connections

Since network connections can be unstable, particularly when using a mobile network, I’ve implemented additional re-connection mechanisms that are available in order to hopefully keep disconnects to a minimum. Should a network drop-out occur, or you change your network (e.g. shifting from mobile to wifi), the client will attempt a re-connect, or renegotiation.

This is currently experimental, and will occur when an error would otherwise appear. It will continue to be worked on and improved.

Room restriction indicators

There are numerous restrictions that can be applied to rooms. These can include preventing unregistered users from joining, adding a room password or hiding the room from the public directory. Since these settings may not be immediately obvious, I’ve added some indicators to the room header bar. These complement the 18+ indicator that existed already for age-restricted rooms.

Other fixes and improvements

• Videos and playlists should error less often after an improvement to the database structure
• An issue with @mentioning a user notifying every user was fixed
• If a user’s subscription ends or is cancelled, their gold status is removed.
• Fixed broadcasts starting paused on future versions of chrome.
• Added cache status check to status page after a cache service failure caused a site-wide outage.

If you want to get more frequent updates and site news, be sure to follow the Twitter or Facebook feeds.

Vivaldi

One of the main perks planned for gold members (monthly subscribers) is to allow higher resolution video. Now, by subscribing you will broadcast at double the resolution (480p, up from 240p), along with a higher frame rate (30fps, up from 15fps) and a better bitrate (256kbps, up from 128kbps).

Video quality is not set in stone, however, and may increase in the future. But for now I’ll be keeping an eye on the performance impact.

Better packing algorithm for cams

A major complaint for users in more populated rooms was that above 6 cams, they would become far too small. This was due to the packing algorithm which determined the sizes and distribution of cams given the available space. A long-term task for me was to allow these cams to better fill the actual space in the cam section, and until recently was a dead-end. I have finally come upon a solution that works quite effectively, and also improves performance as a bonus.

Predictive emoji popup

Emoji were added some time ago, though using them via the picker was somewhat cumbersome and not fitting for fast conversation. In order to make emoji easier to add to a message, there is now an emoji prediction feature whereby emoji could be selected by entering part of a colon code, such as :ok, that will open a popup showing search results matching that code.

Additional features and fixes

Remember YouTube audio settings

YouTube video audio will now be saved locally, and restored on new sessions. This means no more unexpected ear-shattering audio in the middle of the night.

Additionally, video audio now defaults to 50%.

Allow audio when screen-sharing

Screen-sharing now allows an audio stream along with video, and works the same way as every other video source. Additionally, frame rate for screen-sharing should be on-par with other video, or around 15 fps.

A fairly significant update this time around adding, among other things, a new site supporter system. This, unlike the previous Ko-fi donation page, allows your support to be attributed to your account. Becoming a site supporter, either by a single donation or becoming a subscriber, opens up the ability for additional user or room perks in the future.

While supporter bonuses are currently limited to some visual indications that you’re super rad and are contributing to the continued operation of the site, more additions are being planned for the future. These will naturally be applied to any existing site supporter, so keep an eye out for those!

Powered by Stripe

Supporting the site is now possibly by selecting either a single payment or recurring subscription from the new support page. This will then take you to the payment page, where you can enter your card details. This should be it, if successful, you will now and forever be a site supporter!

Stripe is the system powering the checkout, which allows secure collection of card details and an efficient payment mechanism. If you’re wondering what Stripe is, it’s the same payment gateway used by KickStarter, as well as 1000’s of other eCommerce sites, small businesses and service providers alike. So it’s trustworthy, and to boot will not allow me to record any payment information, meaning breaches will not cause your card details to be leaked.

More features to come

Among the planned features coming for site supporters, there are:

• Higher quality broadcasts
• custom user icon (including animated gifs)
• Ability for room owners to upload their own custom emoji for their room
• Possibility to reserve nicknames

Additional features and improvements

Aside from the new supporter system, there have been a number of new additions and improvements these past weeks. These include media playlists, scroll pausing and allowing password resets via username.

Playlists

A much requested feature was the ability to add videos to a playlist. Now, the YouTube player has been extended to allow videos to be queued up and played in succession.

Playlists are currently quite simple in function, adding a video moves it to the end of the queue. You can remove videos, but not move or re-order them. This is of cause a planned improvement. Additionally, there are plans to include more sources for videos aside from just YouTube, and the playlist will allow all of these in one list. So whether you add YouTube, Digital Motion, Vimeo or Twitch videos, they’ll work exactly the same (hopefully).

Pause chat feed scrolling

If you’ve ever wanted to scroll up to see something you’ve missed, only to be launched back to a new message, fret no more. Now, scrolling the chat feed will pause the auto-scroll until you restore it. Either by using the handy pop-in button, or just by scrolling to the bottom yourself.

Password reset via username

Previously, password resets were requested via an email, though emails are not a unique user attribute. This could have caused issues where a user shared an email, for whatever reason, with a fellow user. Or they simply had more than one account.

Instead, you can now use your username and an email will be sent to the associated email address, assuming it’s verified of cause.

Admin additions

More controls have been added for administrators (me), to improve my ability to moderate users and rooms. These include an ability to close guest rooms temporarily if they are causing T&C breaches. I have also included rate limiting on reports, limited to 3 per 30 minutes. This is to prevent report-spamming and keep me a little bit saner. So please, only send a report when it really needs to be sent.

If you want to get more frequent updates and site news, be sure to follow the Twitter or Facebook feeds.

Vivaldi

A few new features have been added, and some improvements to existing ones too. Emojis have been added and profiles can now be viewed in a room as a pop-up. Icons used throughout the site have also been updated and I’ve added a basic media server reconnection mechanism, which should help those with flaky connections. Also a new pop-up shows when you get banned, so at least you’ve got something less terrible to look at while you contemplate your actions.

Emoji support

Emojis can now be used in chat, via the picker that is accessed by the smiley button next to the send button in the chat input. They can also be sent via colon-codes, such as :tada: if you can remember them. This is a first pass at adding emoji, and as such there aren’t some helpful features like displaying the actual emoji in the input or having any sort of auto-complete. This will of cause be added in the future.

Popup profiles

Profiles can now be viewed within the room itself, rather than opening up a separate profile page. Selecting the “profile” option in the user list dropdown menu will now open this popup, which gives some basic information about the user, such as what kind of user they are, their profile pic, and a selection of trophies they have received. You can still open their full profile via the link at the bottom, which will link you to their full profile page.

Ultimately, this should give profiles more reason to be updated, as they can actually be viewed in a way that isn’t out of the way and annoying.

Media server reconnection

This marks the second attempt at media server reconnection, the previous one causing more problems and, moreover, not actually reconnecting you to anything.

This attempt simply reconnects you to an existing session if you happen to lose connection, such as if your computer falls asleep or you move the app to the background on mobile. Not all the connection issues will be fixed with this, but the most frequent and more annoying problems should at least be less irritating.

New icons

I’m beginning to move icons to use SVGs, rather than an icon font. This is thanks to FontAwesome 5’s improved plugins and should hopefully improve performance and might even look a little bit better on top. Nothing should be radically different, but icons might look a bit neater over all.

Other fixes

• Moderators, room owners and admins can now bypass a passworded room.
• New broadcasts while cams are closed will no longer infinitely show a loading spinner.
• If you have been site-banned, a reason for your ban will show on the ban popup.

As always, go to https://jumpin.chat and make a chat room, invite people and have fun and stuff.

The only way I can make this thing better is having you break it! Or even better getting even more people using it who then also break it!

If you want to get more frequent updates and site news, be sure to follow the Twitter or Facebook feeds.