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I try to organize the internal support for developers in my company as follow. When a developer has a problem:

  • he looks for the answer in askbot
  • if he does not find the answer, he posts a new question
  • if the problem is urgent he asks for help in a support chat room where someone is always available
  • depending on his problem the discussion toggles on a chat room with an appropriate topic where other experts can help.
  • when the problem is solved the question is answered and the discussion is tagged and linked to the question.

This process avoids very long threads in questions (so they stay clear) and gives more facilities to find help than broadcasting with emails or RSS feeds, especially in a private area where the support can be organized.

chat.stackoverlow gives this possibility.

So I have forked, refactored and integrated the project https://github.com/thepug/speeqe">Speeqe in Askbot. At this stage my instance of askbot is linked with a jabber server based on openfire (it should work as well with ejabberd). There is a tab to list the chatrooms available. When the user clicks on a chatroom, he joins the room with his askbot account and can chat in a web client open in a new tab. See the snapshots joined.

Lot of stuff remain to do, mainly to link discussions with questions, browse the chatrooms history, and so on, .., but it begins to be interesting.

Does this feature have to be natively integrated in askbot?

chat room list

web chat client

Samuel's avatar
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Samuel
updated 2011-08-10 11:19:30 -0600, asked 2011-08-10 11:15:16 -0600
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It is a very nice feature, we could actually use it here at the askbot site, would be also great to have an option to connect with IRC as well.

My preference for this would be to somehow allow customizing the site on the level of django settings or urls configurations to add features like these. If possible, it would be nice to avoid creating some new plugin system.

Some changes in askbot will be necessary for that - let's try to figure out which ones.

Evgeny's avatar
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Evgeny
answered 2011-08-10 13:45:54 -0600
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Sure, I could share with you what I have done. I have completely rework the project Speeqe in this spirit. If you copy the project in the folder deps, then import the Speeqe settings in the settings of askbot and do the same with URLs you can acces the chartrooms without being integrated in askbot templates.
Samuel's avatar Samuel (2011-08-10 14:34:52 -0600) edit
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How should I proceed to share it? 1) commit my Speeqe fork in ...deps/speeqe in a new branch in Askbot on Github 2) Fork Askbot in Github, then commit my work in deps/speeqe/... 3) Fork Speeqe in github to produce a standalone django package that askbot will integrate? What do you think?
Samuel's avatar Samuel (2011-08-11 04:49:08 -0600) edit
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Speeqe is AGPL. If you copy code from that into Askbot, it effectively changes the license of Askbot into AGPL. Not necessarily a problem for me but there might be sites affected by it as AGPL requires any public deployment to offer source modifications if any to the public.
mether's avatar mether (2011-08-11 05:25:35 -0600) edit
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I prefer to allow adding speeqe to the site as an option in the spirit of Django, and don't want to change the license. But still please first just push a fork with the chat app bundled, we'll see how to decouple it then.
Evgeny's avatar Evgeny (2011-08-11 08:23:49 -0600) edit
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Sorry for the latency of my response. I have published the sources on github ( https://github.com/sguerin ). A fork of askbot with a small update to embed the fork of speeqe available in the other repo in the branch askbot.
Samuel's avatar Samuel (2011-08-17 09:09:25 -0600) edit
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