Chat Alerts and Replying From Any Page
Administrators get every new chat as an alert on whatever page they are on, front end or wp-admin, and can answer it right there. A dark rail on the right edge of every page lists the chats; clicking one opens it as a chat window docked along the bottom of the page.
Available since 1.16.0.
The chat rail
The rail appears for administrators on every page of the site: the shop, product pages, checkout, the dashboard and every other wp-admin screen, including pages where the visitor chat bubble is hidden. Visitors never see it and never load any of it.
- Bell at the top, with the number of chats waiting for a reply. Clicking it opens every waiting chat, oldest first.
- Chats below, waiting ones first. The coloured ring says where each stands: amber is waiting for a reply, green is yours, grey is another admin’s.
- ⇤ expands the rail to show names, the last message and the page the visitor is on. ☰ opens the full Chats page.
Agents answer chats rather than start them, so the visitor chat bubble is hidden for administrators. To see the site as a visitor, use a private window or log out.
Replying from any page
Click a chat in the rail and it opens as a window docked at the bottom of the page. Several can be open side by side, as many as fit the screen; the rest are counted in a +N more chip, and closing a window brings the next one in.
- Every message shows its date and time underneath, in your own time zone: Today 14:32, Yesterday 09:10, 2 Oct 14:32, with the year added for earlier years. Visitors see the same under each message in the chat bubble.
- Enter sends the reply; Shift+Enter adds a new line.
- ↗ opens the chat on the Chats page, ✓ closes the chat, ✕ hides the window.
- Open windows, and anything typed but not yet sent, stay put as you move from page to page.
- A chat another admin is handling says so, with Take over to make it yours.
The first admin to reply to a chat is assigned to it, unless someone assigned it by hand first.
Alerts
Each new chat raises three alerts:
- A desktop notification with the visitor’s message and page, even when the browser is in the background. Click it to open the chat.
- The New message sound from Display > Sounds (turned off by Play sounds there). It plays in any tab of the site you have clicked since it loaded, even when that tab is in the background behind another window.
- The waiting count in the tab title, for example (2) Shop, in every open tab of the site.
The first time, click the pulsing bell and allow notifications when the browser asks. Notification permission is per browser and per site, so each admin allows it once in each browser they use, and it then covers every page.
Browsers will not play a page’s sound until you have clicked somewhere on that page since it loaded. While that is the case the bell pulses; one click on it (or anywhere on the page) enables the sound for that page. Desktop notifications are not affected: they appear, with your operating system’s notification sound, either way.
However many tabs of the site you have open, each browser checks for chats at the Poll Interval on the Behaviour tab (every second with Ultra Ajax, otherwise every 2 seconds), shows one notification per chat and plays the sound once, not once per tab. Each check loads only Super Speedy Chat and the plugins ticked under Plugins to keep loading in Fast mode on the Status tab, whatever the Ajax Type.
Who gets alerted
Admin Chat Alerts on the Behaviour tab decides who hears follow-up messages:
| Setting | New chats | Visitor follow-ups |
|---|---|---|
| Alert every admin for every visitor message | Every admin | Every admin |
| New chats alert every admin; follow-ups alert only the admin who replied first | Every admin | The assigned admin (everyone while nobody is assigned) |
Troubleshooting
| What you see | Cause and fix |
|---|---|
| No desktop notifications | Notifications are blocked for the site: click the padlock in the address bar and allow them. On Windows and macOS, also check the browser is allowed to show notifications in the system settings, and that Do Not Disturb or Focus is off. |
| Notifications appear but no sound plays in the page | The page has not been clicked since it loaded: click the bell. Check Play sounds under Display > Sounds. |
| No rail on the front end | You are not logged in as an administrator, or the browser blocks cookies for the site. Visit any wp-admin page once and reload. |
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