Support/Live Chat/Node.js

What?

This page outlines the work being done to implement a server that will work with an AJAX-based Live Chat frontend. The goal is to eventually replace the existing Java-based Live Chat system.

Repository

The project has been codenamed "Inko" (Parakeet in Japanese). The repository for the new code is hosted on GitHub, at http://github.com/endtwist/inko.

API

See: http://wiki.github.com/endtwist/inko/web-api

Roadmap

• June 10: Authentication
  • ^[√] Find existing Django session ID in cookie
  • ^[√] Extract Django session data from database
  • ^[√] Create new "chat session" ID cookie
    • Use modified Session library from Express to store data (in memory?)
  • ^[√] Retrieve chat permissions from database
  • ^[√] Add authentication check (against stored session) to each page load
  • ^[√] Automatically authenticate user upon first load of chat system, if logged in. Otherwise, redirect them to the login.

• June 17: Basic Messaging
  • ^[√] Build "Message" object that will contain all of the important message data and serialize it into a json object
  • ^[√] Create a "Room" object that will allow both 1-on-1 and multi-user conversations to be initialized.
  • ^[√] Guests should only be allowed in one room at a time?
  • ^[√] How to hash room names/keep them private?
  • ^[√] /message -> allow users to create new Message objects with data
  • ^[√] Add filtering for messages that will strip any potentially-harmful data (<tags>, etc.)
  • ^[√] Add CSRF verification.
  • ^[√] /listen -> add listener for new Message objects using long polling

• June 24: Watchers
  • ^[√] Allow authorized users (check perms) to join 1-on-1 rooms
  • ^[√] Messages in rooms should be broadcast to all users
  • ^{[ ]} Watchers should not be allowed to speak in rooms
  • ^[√] Add ability to pass conversations to other users
  • ^[√] Agent interface as reference implementation

• July 1: Non-Authenticated Guests
  • ^[√] Allow guests that are not authenticated to join the support queue.
  • ^[√] Setting and updating a user's status
  • ^[√] Agent-Agent private chat

• July 6 - 10: Summit 2010!

• July 15: Guest Interface
  • ^[√] Guest interface as reference implementation
  • ^[√] Chat queue status (queue positioning/time estimate)

• July 22: Logging & Group Chat Permissions
  • ^{[ ]} Add ability to kick users from chatrooms. Ban?
  • ^{[ ]} Message/conversation data needs to be logged somewhere

Notes

• Agents must be approved before they can pick questions from the chat queue.  This is currently the "Live Chat helpers" group on sumo
• Also, room monitors have permission to watch any chat room, open/close the queue, and set other helpers' limits.

Features currently used in Live Chat XMPP server

Core chat features

• Automatic scrollback log when users join a conference
• Individual status for each signed in user. (Online/Away/etc)
• Private messaging between conference members
• Storage of all logs, along with metadata, in a database for later access
• Wiki formatting and links
• Individual messages up to 30KB each
• Chat sessions up to 2MB each
• Notification when another user is typing
• Join/part notifications
• Topic for each room
• Ability to invite other users into a conference
• Up to 50 users chatting at a time in up to 50 conferences, with up to 600 combined messages per minute
• Access control for users in conferences
  • Permission to join
  • Permission to invite
  • Permission to kick
  • Permission to set the topic

Chat queue features

• Ability for up to 50 people to be waiting in queues at once
• Fair dispatching of requests to available helpers, based on specific criteria
• Ability of helpers to set their chat limit
• Access levels to determine who can receive questions from the queue
• "Room monitoring" ability that allows privileged users to join or monitor any chat in progress
• Metadata associated with each room entered by the user being helped, including question/OS/version/useragent/plugins/etc (AAQ)
• Tag data associated with each room, either entered by helpers or automatically detected
• Integration with CSAT surveys to track which chats are successful
• Integration with support forum for users who need to follow up
• Ability for a monitoring helper to take over a conversation
• Ability for privileged users to open/close the chat queue
• Automatic chat queue status based on number of people signed in and the number of people waiting. (Must automatically close when the queue is "full")
• Give people waiting in queue updates on their current queue position

Staging

• Software requirements are outlined in the repo: http://github.com/endtwist/inko
• The server needs to daemonize itself.
  • PID should go into /var/run/
  • Log file should go into /var/log/
    • It would be best to rotate logs with logrotate.
• Restarting the server occurs how?