

Ask HN:  What do you use for persistent chat? - cschmitt

We are trying to improve intergroup communication at my job.  One of the ideas we have come up with is to create a persistant chat room (or channel) for the groups to chat on.  Then when an issue comes up the groups all have a history of the conversation.  Currently we use GTalk for chat and most of us use Adium for a chat client.  The only requirement is that the chat room log has to be visible to all parties with at least 48 hours of history.<p>So the question is, what do you guys use for persistent chatrooms?
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9mit3t2m9h9a
If you use GTalk already, maybe migrating to XMPP MUC (which is the same
protocol) served by, say, ejabberd could be the most straightforward way. It
has log configuration (just as IRC does), but it it slightly easier to set up
to push logs to clients on entering a room.

Just in case: XMPP and Jabber are the same protocol. Ejabberd is a popular
XMPP server (written in Erlang, if you care about compiling from source; not
hard to deploy). Google Chat uses XMPP and supports both GMail users chatting
on external MUC servers and non-GMail users from another XMPP server joining
GMail-hosted chats. XMPP servers usually host Multi-user conference service
(aka MUC aka group chat), but it is separate enough that you could just
configure MUC-only XMPP server with proper logging settings without allowing
any user accounts on the server and connect via existing GMail accounts.

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cschmitt
Depending on the monthly cost of outsourcing I have thought about running a
jabber server. Can you setup your jabber server to pass through authentication
over to gtalk?

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9mit3t2m9h9a
In that case maybe you want to setup conference-only jabber server that
doesn't allow logging in to it but hosts MUCs and manages logs.

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girasquid
<http://hipchat.com> is pretty quick to set up - it has web, desktop, and
mobile clients - they also seem to have experimental support for XMPP/Jabber
([http://blog.hipchat.com/2011/04/25/experimental-support-
for-...](http://blog.hipchat.com/2011/04/25/experimental-support-for-
xmppjabber/)), which would let you use Adium to connect.

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cschmitt
I was looking at hipchat and I do have some past experience with it. Thanks
for the comment

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cschmitt
Here is the simple criteria I am using: 1\. Must use gtalk 2\. Must have
persistant history for at least 48 hours (searchable is a bonus) 3\. Must be
accessible from adium or other chat clients 4\. Must be private for our org.

So far I have identified, Jaconda, hipchat and campfire (although I think it
is out due to the lake of gtalk integration)

(Sorry for not posting this right up front)

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Smotko
We use IRC and a custom bot that logs chat history and does some other cool
stuff. It works surprisingly well and it's really easy and fun to add new
functionality to the bot.

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cschmitt
good thought.. thanks for the comment

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cryptoz
That sounds like an excellent use case for IRC.

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cschmitt
Not off the table just yet. But I was looking for a hosted 3rd party solution.

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saiko-chriskun
<http://grove.io> ?

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noemit
Jumpino

