Feature
Who is here, and who they are
The user list is how a community sees itself. Ours shows roles, avatars and a link back to each person’s profile on your site.
Your profiles, not ours
When you identify members through single sign-on, their name, avatar and profile URL come from your site, so a click in the chat goes to your member page.
Roles are visible
Operators and moderators are marked, so a visitor knows who to ask.
Actions where they are needed
Ignore, private message, or — for an operator — remove a message or ban, from the list rather than from a separate console.
How it works
What the list knows
Who is actually here
Presence is held in memory and updated as people arrive and leave, so the list is what is true now rather than who has visited today. Somebody who closes the tab is gone from it within seconds.
What state they are in
Available, away, busy — and invisible, which is honoured rather than quietly ignored. An invisible operator can read the room without appearing in it, which is the point of the setting.
Who they are, if you know
With single sign-on the name and picture are the ones your own site holds, so the list reads like your membership rather than like a set of nicknames.
Where they are, roughly
City and country, from the connection, shown quietly beside the name — and hidden entirely on sites that turn it off, which is a setting because for some audiences it is context and for others it is unwelcome.
Questions
- Does the list show people who are signed out?
- It shows whoever is in the room, which includes guests who joined with a name. People who are reading without joining are not in the list, because they have not said who they are.
- Can I hide the location?
- Yes, per site, and then it is not shown to anybody. It is a display choice rather than a privacy fix — turning it off stops it being rendered.
- How large can the list get?
- The plan sets how many people can be in the chat at once, and the list reflects that. It is built for rooms in the hundreds rather than tens of thousands; a broadcast to fifty thousand people is a different product.
- Does invisible actually work?
- Yes. The legacy behaviour of showing invisible users to administrators is not carried over — invisible means invisible, including to you.
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