we're using Twilio Conversations to power 1-to-1 chat for a webapp. I see that the unreadMessagesCount implemented via Read Horizon can indicate the number of unread messages in a particular conversation for a participant.
My question: Is there a way to get the total unread messages for ALL of a user's ongoing conversations? E.g., if a user has 3 ongoing conversations that each have 5 unread messages, I would like to provide the user with an badge showing they have 15 unread messages (i.e., the customary user experience using messaging apps).
Would we have to loop through all the conversations that a user is a participant of and call unreadMessagesCount for each? If so, have some concern if that would bog down performance too much as some users could be a participant to a large number of conversations.
If total count of unread messages in all conversations is not able to be implemented efficiently, would also be fine if could just identify the total number of 1-on-1 conversations that have 1+ unread messages. But have not found a way to do this either.
Appreciate any thoughts on the best way to implement this.
Related
While thinking through a system design for real-time chat, I am curious what kind queue whatsapp or FB messenger is using on Server side to deliver the message to recipient. What I was thinking was there is a per-person queue/kafka-topic, so when a new message need to be deliver to user A, the message is enqueue to A's queue.
However, there may be billions of users (FB has 2 billion users), does that mean we need 2 billion queues/topics(in kafka term)? If so, which queue can handle this performantly.
Any comment is welcome!
Thank you!
I have an e-commerce website and I want to implement a messaging solution between my clients, using ably.io. I am new to ably.io and also to pub/sub message pattern and need some advice to put me on the right track.
Let’s say I have 75,000 users on my website. Users can create an advertisement... if anyone is interested in the advertisement they should be able to message the advertiser.
This is the solution that comes to my mind after reading ably's documentation:
Since I have 75,000 users, I create 75,000 channels, 1 channel per user.
An user named Brian creates an advertisement on the website. Brian subscribes to BrianChannel to receive all messages on his own channel. Now Amy and Tom have seen Brian's advertisement and want to contact him, they publish a message on BrianChannel and Brian would receive the messages.
I am not sure if the above solution is the right approach?
If the above solution is the right way, I have 2 further questions:
Let's Brian uses JavaScript to subscribe to BrianChannel. Now Brian is obviously not online 24/7 - how should I handle his messages while he is offline?
I have 75,000 users registered on my website. At any point of time 5,000 users are online. Out of these 5000 users online, 20 users are actually messaging each other. Using my solution above, I should have 5,000 active channels for all the online users... Is there a way to reduce the number of active channels? Perhaps by periodically polling the channels?
This is Srushtika, Dev Advocate at Ably.
Your approach is correct and is in-fact the most commonly implemented one. i.e, each of your 75,000 users will have their own channels to which only they will be subscribed to. Any other client who wishes to send them a message, will attach to 'their' channel and publish messages to it. Since all users are always subscribed to their own channels, they will be able to receive any messages intended for them.
If any of your subscriber clients are not online at the time a message is to be sent to them, Ably's Realtime platform will, by default, retain it for 2min after which, if the subscriber client is still offline, the messages will be discarded. However, using the Persisted History feature, you can increase the time for which messages are retained to 24-72hrs.
Unfortunately, as of now, Ably doesn't offer a mechanism to detach from channels with no activity while the client is still online. But, this feature is coming soon. Keep an eye on our Engineering blog where we post all such updates.
Hope that answers your question.
I have a bot over Facebook which people are subscribing for sports updates.
I have 1,000 - 10,000 users I want to send out an update to.
Currently, in small scales like 20 messages , I would use a Facebook Batch request.
But, i'm not sure what would be the best way to send my messages in a large scale.
My two options are:
Batch - limited to 50 requests per batch request.
I don't really know if I should expect a delay in the execution of the request.
Regular calls - I will iterate through my receivers and send each of them a message separately.
I'm afraid Facebook might block me for thinking i'm spamming, or I will exceed the rate limits.
I have to say I was expecting a more generic method coming from Facebook since they are allowing users to subscribe for update through my bot, hence, I was expecting them to provide a guide on what are the best practices for sending the update users subscribed for.
You should definitely use Facebook Messenger Broadcast API for this. This will broadcast your message to all user subscribed to the bot.
Caveats:
You have to apply for this permission. (pages_messaging and pages_messaging_subscriptions.Takes about 1-2 days, but
can test on Admin/Test users of the app)
Each broadcast has to be a separate broadcast. (e.g. you can't send image and a text together, each has to be its own individual broadcast).
Have some kind of un-subscription option as well. FB user might think you are spamming even if you clearly say in the messages that your bot will send updates.
Use custom labels to create targetted sends. So you can either subdivide who you will send updates to about specific issues or just label people if they unsubscribe to your broadcast or not.
Basic workflow:
Get permission to broadcast.
Create message_creative_id via POST to endpoint
Use message_creative_id to POST a broadcast_messages
On a successful send you will get back broadcast_id
I am developing a mobile messaging app (ios) and I support the logout feature. I want to keep the latest conversation list when the users logs in back again. Because the local storage of the app gets cleaned once logout.
I am using MAM XEP-0313 sucessfully but I have not found an IQ to query the conversation list of a particular user.
For example:
chat
user_a -> user_b
user_c
user_d
user_f
user_a has had conversations with 4 users and he wants to logout of the app, when he comes back in he needs to get those last 4 conversation threads on his list.
What I do when a user messages another user is that I add them to my roster and have the logic of automatic subscription. So I was thinking to use the roster history logic to query this collection but I was also expecting the MAM module to have a more direct way..
I am using MongooseIM server
I understand your problem, the solution you have is probably the best one you can have with standard XEPs and their implementations.
The conversation list is actually sth missing in MAM spec or in general in XMPP. There are some works to define an extension to get you all the conversations where you have some unread messages (so called "unread sync"). Will this be enough for you or you would rather want to get some kind of "inbox". By "inbox" I mean a list of all recent conversations with unread messages count where there are some unread messages.
I'm trying to implement chat for my webapp with following features:
When user logs in he should see a number of unread messages (which is both offline messages and "unseen", I will explain "unseen" in next step).
When user is anywhere in the app but on chat window he should be notified that he has a new message. Message should be marked "unseen" and must be added to the count of unread messages.
The first point is quite easily achieved using XEP-0013: Flexible Offline Message Retrieval. So I can retrieve offline messages and when I'm sure user has seen them - I remove them from unread list. But the problem is: how do I achieve same thing for "unseen" messages?
In short what I need is: any message should be marked as offline, unless user sees it and it's removed from the list by explicit request.
Can I achieve that with XMPP and how do I do that?
Thanks in advance.
What you are trying to do is to basically store a counter of unseen stuff in your account. I think you do not need flexible offline retrieval as when you connect the messages would simply become unseen. You thus only have to deal with one case: Unseen.
I will reply from the perspective of ejabberd, that I know better as one of the developer: I would use private storage to store your current state of unseen count and conversation.