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Ask HN: Private group chat with no registration

2 points by tchaffee ↗ HN
I'm looking for recommendations for a private group chat service to plan an event. Some folks are on Skype but not Facebook. Some folks have WhatsApp but nothing else. Some folks have only email. Trying to coordinate all the communication is a challenge.

Features I'm looking for:

- No registration needed for group members. If one person has to register and own the chat room that would be ok.

- A way to easily share the chat room. I can't think of anything more convenient than a link, but I'm open to other solutions as long as non-technical people would find it easy.

- Persistent. Folks can enter and exit the same chat and see the history.

- Chat room can eventually be deleted when no longer needed.

- Browser based with no additional software to install.

- Open source is always nice.

7 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] thread
LinuxBender
UnrealIRCD front-ended by TheLounge web interface that has history would fit what you described, but the setup is not super quick unless one finds Ansible playbooks for both. I would imagine public Ansible scripts for this exist.

No registration would be required and TheLounge provides chat persistence. Both are open source. Visitors would not need to be technical and would not need to know IRC commands. Rooms can be deleted by the channel operator. Clients of TheLounge require only a browser and do not require any additional software. The IRC daemon scales to tens of thousands of people on a small server. Adding a web front-end reduces that number a little.

[1] - https://www.unrealircd.org/ https://github.com/unrealircd/unrealircd/

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://github.com/thelounge

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LinuxBender
I should add to this for completeness sake that TheLounge in public mode, anyone can join but history is lost when they disconnect. In private mode history is kept but you have to pre-populate users with a password they would change after logging in. i.e. create alice and bob with a default password and email or text it to them. Sadly there is no self service registration page yet.

I had a live demo of ngircd and thelounge which all together took me about 9 minutes to set up. On Alpine Linux this was just "apk add ngircd thelounge" then edit my nginx proxy config, edit 2 config files, start the services.

gam3
The y99.in Website seems to have what you want. You can create an open chat and share a like to it. People using the like only need to choose a unique username.

Here is a example chat I created.

https://y99.in/web/desktop/pages/807632

tchaffee
Have you used it before or you just found it now doing a search?
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justsomehnguy
> No registration needed for group members

This one is the most troublesome I think.

Usually this is in a conferencing solutions though, so no such thing as chat rooms, I think.

Otherwise I would suppose something like XMPP with a web frontend, eg https://movim.eu/

ejabberd supports anonymous users, though I can't say if movim or any else web-client supports that natively

https://www.ejabberd.im/Anonymous-users-support/index.html