BuddyPress Group ChatroombyVenutius

This plugin provides neat chatrooms into BuddyPress groups. Each Group admin can enable a group Chat room, available for all group members to view and post.

The Chat area provides an ajax chat room which displays the most recent messages along with timestamps and usernames. It also has a “who’s online” area which shows other group members viewing the Chat page.

Features

• Who’s Online list of members in the chatroom.
• Text Chat: Supports text and links added via the text input box.
• Video and other embeds – Videos such as You-tube can be added as an embedded video using the Video button. The same link can be used for other WordPress embedable urls.
• Emojis supported: over 1,000 emojis easily inserted into the chat stream with options to load them all or just a subset.
• Images: Users with upload_files capability can add images from the media directory/upload into the chat stream.
• Images Lightbox: Supports WP Featherlight lightbox, if you install this plugin then images loaded into chat will open in a lightbox.
• Activity threading: chat conversations can be collected and posted to the activity stream.
• Moderation: Group admin and moderators can delete chat messages.
• Theming: Chat message box colours can be set by Group Admin
• Auto-hide of chat messages after up to 30 days.
• Auto-deletion of chat messages after up to 30 days.

Chat messages support links, embeded video is supported an it’s possible to call in another site member to the chat using @mentions.

I’ve introduced rudimentary threads support. The behavior is that a new message, posted more then 15 minutes after the last message will be marked as a new thread. All messages posted after that initial message will be regarded as part of that thread. After 15 minutes the thread will be deemed closed and if posting of threads to group activity is enabled then all messages in the thread will be posted in a single activity update. I’m expecting this functionality to change as the plugin develops.

Currently the chat supports text chat and the sharing of links. I’m interested in adding further features but would like to see some user requests for the same.

This plugin was originally created by David Cartwright and has been forked by Venutius. It includes an emoji set which was sourced from WP Emoji One by Monchito.net.

This plugin runs from your own server, no chat data leaves your site. This has has the benefit of minimizing your exposure regarding user privacy and GDPR, however chat will be as responsive as your server and can be laggy because of this. User conversations are stored for one month then deleted.