README

A light 2D talker world inside your Flarum forum: a modern web rewrite of The Chatting Zone (TCZ), the 1990s telnet talker. Members walk between rooms and chat in speech bubbles, with TCZ's own commands, feelings, ranks and who list. No telnet, no game engine: one canvas, one small art atlas, the forum's own members, groups and permissions.

What members get

Rooms to walk around. Click or tap the floor (or use the arrow keys) and you walk there; walk through a door to go to the next room. Four rooms out of the box: the Lobby, the Arcade, the Lounge and the Rooftop, with lighting that follows the forum's clock (the Rooftop's sky goes from sunny to starry).
Talking, TCZ style. say, emote (:waves), think (+hmm), ask, and every TCZ feeling command (wave, ack, aha, baa, puke, moose, hug Ben = tightly…), with bubbles over your head and a room log.
Long distance. page and tell one person or several at once (tell ben,tutrix = hi), remote, reply, and recall for the last eight sent to you, in a Tells tab.
Whispers that reach people who aren't there. A page or tell for someone who isn't in the Hangout goes to them as a direct message, labeled "Whisper from the Hangout" with a link back, through Parley, ramon/chat or core's Messages: the first of the admin's order that the forum has (or one of them, or off). Their answer in Chat or Messages shows up in your Tells while you're in the Hangout; Parley's go one way. That extension's own permissions, blocks and limits apply, and someone with you on their Hangout enemies list gets nothing.
Who's on. TCZ's who list with prefix, name, suffix and title, the room and idle times; connect and disconnect lines with your own messages; afk with a reason; people doze (zZ) when idle.
Your card. Click anyone for their card: rank, title, mood (feeling chirpy), description (describe), time here, and their latest post you're allowed to see.
Ranks. TCZ's ranks tied to Flarum groups, with names and colours the admin can change: the Wizard ladder (Apprentice Wizard, Wizard, Elder Wizard), the Druid ladder (Apprentice Druid, Druid, Elder Druid), the Deity, and Retired, Experienced Builder, Assistant, Builder, Mortal and Moron.
Channels, friends and mail. Chat channels that follow you between rooms, each with its own tab (-gaming hi); friends are pinged when they connect and enemies are ignored; mail reaches someone who isn't on as a Flarum notification; shout reaches every room and yell every room in your area, both rate-limited; aliases for your own short commands; TCZ's partners.
The board. TCZ's BBS as a notice board in the Lobby.
A command bar that takes the classic commands and shorthand (" say, : pose, + think, > tell, < remote), next to buttons for the common feelings.
Phones. The room on top with a camera that follows you, feelings, the log, and the command bar above the keyboard.

Keeping it civil

Report. Every message has a ⋯ beside it. Report raises a Flarum flag, so it lands in the moderators' usual Flags list (needs flarum/flags). The report is a post in a hidden "Hangout reports" discussion that only staff can see, quoting the message as plain text.
Remove. Druids and up (and the Deity) take a message out of everyone's log and bubble, for good (remove, or the ⋯ menu).
Mute. Druids and up stop someone talking, paging, shouting, mailing and posting on the board for a while: mute ben 30, unmute ben, or Mute 10 min / 1 hour in the ⋯ menu. Staff can only act on people below their own rank.
Suspended members (flarum/suspend) can't enter, and suspending someone puts them out at once.
Talking, paging, shouting, yelling, channels, mail, the board and reports all have rate limits.

How it works

Everything said and done is one event log, read by id. With flarum/realtime installed each event is pushed to the people who may see it at once; without it (shared hosting), the page asks every 1.8 s for "anything after event N?", which an up-to-date browser gets from the cache without touching the database.
forum.js only adds the route and the nav link (under 2 KB gzipped). The world is one lazy chunk (about 21 KB gzipped) and one WebP art atlas (about 120 KB). Nothing is added to discussion, post or user lists: Hangout runs no queries outside its own pages.
Tested on MySQL and PostgreSQL, with table prefixes.

Install

composer require ernestdefoe/hangout
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Then enable Hangout in the admin, give groups the Hangout permissions (members can enter, talk and shout by default; guests can't look in unless you let them), and pick a group for each rank (out of the box the Deity is Admins and the Druid is Mods). Optional: flarum/realtime for instant delivery, flarum/flags for reports, flarum/suspend.

To update:

composer update ernestdefoe/hangout
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Credits

Hangout ports the behaviour and text of The Chatting Zone (TCZ) by J.P. Boggis and its contributors. TCZ grew from UglyMUG and from TinyMUD, by the TinyMUD authors; their notices are in COPYRIGHT in full. TCZ's source: https://github.com/smcvey/tcz.

Licence

GPL-2.0-or-later, like TCZ. See LICENSE and COPYRIGHT.

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ernestdefoe / hangout

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