#discussions

Posts and pages on Ape Apps tagged with <strong>#discussions</strong>
I couple of months ago, I mentioned that my long term plan is to replace both Ape Chat and the Ape Apps Discord channel with a resurrected Discussions app, and with the recent crash of the Ape Chat server, I have decided to begin work on this transition, which is now available for testing!




The new Discussions beta is located at https://discussions.social/?beta=1 and is still in the very early stages. On the back end, it runs off of the same server as Ape Chat and uses the same database, so the two apps will be interoperable during the transition, which should make things smoother (and prevent the breaking of any of the in-game chat features).That said, Discussions does include some new features to the chat engine which are not supported by Ape Chat, which may cause some strange rendering issues and confusion when viewing newer posts in the older Ape Chat interface.

For example, one of the new features in Discussions is threaded conversations, or the ability for a chat channel to be designated as a "forum" style.


I eventually want to move a lot of the support forum off of the Ape Apps website and into Discussions, which is why the threaded forum view for channels is necessary. I believe this will help against the constant spam I am always fighting here on the website, since Discussions will require an account for access which will greatly reduce the usefulness of ChatGPT spam that the forum has been plagued with lately.

Another new feature found in the new Discussions beta is chat channel grouping:


Chat channels can now be grouped by topic and given a sort order, which should help clean things up quite a bit.

In addition to channel groups, Discussions has the ability to connect to multiple servers as well, not just the current chat.ape-apps.com server. Once I am ready to release the full Discussions app and shut down the old Ape Chat front end, I am going to clean up the server code and release it as a stand alone package, for anyone who wishes to run their own private Discussions server.

Channel creators have new customization options for their chat channels as well. If you create a new private chat channel (done by prefixing a new channel name with a % sign), you become the moderator of that channel with the ability to add/invite users yourself. This also gives you the ability to customize the channel, from the display name, welcome message, and channel icon.


I am also planning on implementing a custom join link/url that can be used for inviting users to private channels, so that the channel admin does not have to manually invite users to the channel.

There is still quite a bit of work to do on Discussions and I don't plan to make the full transition until later this year, so this is still very much in the preview stage. I still don't have things like private messaging or notifications ported over yet, and some things are a bit wonky. But feel free to try out the new client and give feedback on how it can be improved. I think that when it's done it will be a lot better than the current Ape Chat!

https://discussions.social/?beta=1

#discussions
5mo ago

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Ape Apps, LLC is an independent software development company founded in 2010 by Brandon Stecklein. Over the years, Ape Apps has published over 400 apps and games across various platforms. You can get in touch with Brandon on Twitter or by leaving a post on his wall @bastecklein
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