New Profanity Filter, Welcome Messages, and Much More
Now4real just added a load of new features đź’Ş
The Now4real team has been very busy working on new product features in the past few months. We are thrilled to announce that the following improvements have been made publicly available:
- A brand-new profanity filter
- Custom messages to welcome your users
- Attention grabbers to let your users know about the chat
- Email reports with the chat transcripts of your sites
- Custom contexts to define the boundaries of counters and chat rooms
Let’s see a few details about these new features.
New profanity filter
Previously, Now4real used a third-party service to analyze chat messages and detect profanities and swears. This approach had three main issues: it was potentially slow due to the latency introduced between our cloud servers and the third-party servers; it was subject to throttling, thus queuing massive parallel requests; it was expensive, to the point we had to charge the cost as an additional fee to our customers.
Therefore, we decided to build our own profanity filter, eliminating latency, overcoming throttling, and reducing costs. The good news is that the profanity filter has become free for all the Premium and Enterprise Now4real plans. In other words, you no longer have to pay based on the total number of moderated messages.
From the Now4real Dashboard, select the site preferences, go to the “Profanities and Filters” section, and choose up to 4 languages to be used for the profanity filter of that domain. We currently support 27 languages. If you feel like contributing, we have an open-source GitHub project where more languages can be added, and new words can be added to the current dictionaries. Check it out at https://github.com/now4real/forbidden-words/.
Custom welcome messages
When a user opens the Now4real widget, the chatbox appears, and it displays a welcome message at the top.
Previously, the welcome message couldn’t be customized, even if it was automatically displayed in the current language of the widget.
Now, you can define your custom welcome message for each page. You can even change the icon beside the message (the “now” icon). The message can contain links, emojis, and line breaks. This helps you display the short version of your own chat policy, possibly linking to the extended version.
It’s easy to inject your welcome message and icon. Just add the welcome_message and welcome_message_img_url parameters to the widget object of your Now4real script. You can find the detailed documentation here (scroll down to welcome_message).
Attention grabbers
Now4real is quite a new service (instant communities are a brand-new paradigm), and not all users might understand what that icon means… What are the changing number displayed? What happens if I click? I didn’t notice the icon at all!
To help users notice and understand Now4real, we now display an attention grabber: a bubble that serves the double purpose of explaining the meaning of the numbers and highlighting the possibility of group chatting.
This way, in the example above, the user will immediately understand that there are 3 other visitors at that moment (out of 4, including him/herself), and he/she can chat with them. The number within the message changes in real time!
If there are fewer than 3 users, the attention grabber does not come up. It shows up automatically as soon as it makes sense.
The other cool thing is that you can customize the attention grabbers for every page of your site and define your custom message. You simply need to add the attention_grabber parameter to the widget object of your Now4real script. You can find the detailed documentation here (scroll down to attention_grabber).
What happens if a user closes the attention grabber with the X button? No further attention grabbers will be shown to that user on that site for the next 24 hours.
If you don’t want to display any attention-grabber bubbles at all, you can use the attention_grabber_enabled parameter to disable them.
Chat transcript reports
The Now4real Dashboard has provided access to all the chat transcripts since the beginning. The news is that you can now receive the transcripts automatically via email.
From the Now4real Dashboard, select the site preferences and go to the “Reports” section. You can choose the email delivery frequency, including real-time. And you can specify a list of email recipients.
Reports and notifications will be delivered directly to your email inbox.
Custom contexts
As you know, Now4real blends real-time web analytics and group chats. It helps create instant communities by showing how many people are currently on a web page and enabling live group chats for each page. So, both the counters and the chats need a context definition so that Now4real knows how to aggregate user presence and user messages.
By default, Now4real uses a site context. This means it considers your whole site as a single entity: all the pages contribute to the same global presence counter, and there is only one chat room shared among all the pages of your site. This is useful for websites and blogs with small numbers of concurrent viewers because it allows them to meet easily, even on different pages.
On the other hand, for sites with more visitors, you might want to go for the page context: each page (URL) of your site is considered a different place, so that visitors are counted for each page, and a pagechat (a chat room dedicated to a page) is available for each page.
The big news is that now, you have the possibility of defining a custom context for each page through the page_context parameter of your Now4real script. You have total freedom over defining the scope of user counters and chat rooms. This opens up new scenarios and possibilities, as depicted below.
Query strings
First, you may want to take into consideration query strings, which are stripped by default by Now4real. Let’s say you have a website that uses query strings to identify the current page, such as:https://example.com/shop/shoes?type=sneakers&sort=price_ascending
If you keep the default page context configuration, the resulting page context will be “/shop/shoes”. This means all types of shoes will share the same context (same chat rooms and common counters). But if you want a separate context for each shoe type, you need to put the type attribute in the context. You do this with the configuration below:page_context: { query: ['type'], fragment: false }
The resulting page context will be “/shop/shoes?type=sneakers”.
The query string is automatically cleaned by alphabetically reordering the kept attributes and cleaning up filtered and duplicated attributes.
Fragment
In single-page applications (SPA), it often happens that the current logical page is identified by a fragment (#) at the end of the URI. For example:https://mywebapp.com/#/plan
To include the fragment in the context, you simply need to use this setting:page_context: { query: false, fragment: true }
The resulting page context will be “/#/plan”. Otherwise, by default, it would have been “/”.
For more details on Now4real integration into SPAs, see this article.
Page groups and other scenarios
Thanks to the flexibility of the page_context parameter, you can set up contexts that are made up of groups of pages. For example, you may want to have a shared chat among all the pages that are part of the same section.
In these cases, make sure that you define a page context that corresponds to a valid path for your site. The reason is that the URI corresponding to the page context is used to create a link in the PAGES section of the widget, where the real-time list of pages, sorted by visitors, is displayed.
You can discover the full syntax of the page_context parameter here (scroll down to page_context).
Now4real is a tool that connects your website visitors in real time, with group live chats and presence analytics.
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