A chat room inside the browser console | Hacker News Reader

A chat room inside the browser console

console.chat

167 pointsed38 comments

You got my hopes up, thinking you’d discovered some esoteric way of overloading the console to behave as a chat box itself. Manually calling a global function from the console and having messages logged to it… I guess it is clever, but I hate to admit it’s a bit of a letdown.

Also, long polling when websockets exist? Reeeeeeeeeeeeee

Edit: It’s even worse than that! You pull in the entire chat history every 5 seconds! Reminder to everyone on limited bandwidth not to leave this open lol

Hey it’s Dalton Edwards the creator of Console.Chat! To whoever shared my project - thank you! And to everybody enjoying it - thank you!! I know it’s silly and could be improved upon (that’s why it’s open source)! I code silly stuff like this all the time just to experiment.

Cheers for a few hours of fun

This is super cool! I love when people make fun projects that use standard tools in clever ways. Well done!

That is what is required. Great work! Keep experimenting. Never get discouraged no matter what anybody says. And keep collaborating :)

It's not silly. It proves you are a very creative person and I love it :-)

Hey Dalton, submitter here. Saw this on 1kprojects and thought it was a clever idea!

Anybody claiming to be me (Dalton) or an admin/moderator is lying. Anybody can set their username to anything and I advise everybody to exercise caution as impersonation is very easy. Thanks

Your censor doesn't work on unicode fonts.

and I wonder how easy it is to make people type the British slang for cigarettes.

Reminds me of hackmud, which is annoying as hell because you gotta use programming language styled commands to do anything, instead of a more shell friendly typing language... This isn't as annoying as Hackmud at least, since it's just username("") and send("") you use to talk / set your username.

After typing cc(), nothing I type works:

Firefox: Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid or unexpected token

Chrome: Uncaught SyntaxError: Invalid or unexpected token

type "send("message","color in hex"(optional))

Does anyone know if you can exploit the CodeMirror instance that's installed with every download of the Chrome browser? Fun fact: you can inspect the web inspector if you have it in a separate window to confirm that it does indeed use CodeMirror. Very meta.

I really enjoy Cabal (https://github.com/cabal-club/cabal-cli), which is a decentralized chat client at the terminal (built on DAT/Hypercore).

Fixed it in my fork: https://github.com/MrStonedOne/console.chat

Swearword filtering removed.

Oefh, this apparently doesn't page the messages, and instead loads all of them for the given domain at once at an interval—over and over again. Besides that, cool!

The 'read' api is incredibly simple.

https://github.com/DaltonWebDev/console.chat/blob/master/api...

Make it a habit to always filter user input. Eg. Variables put into paths and SQL.

I have patched the path traversal security bug in production, just haven’t pushed to GitHub. This project was coded upwards of 6 months ago I’ve learned a lot since then.

I would recommend never running code in production that you haven't commited into git.

4 things: 1. It doesn't use p2p discovery 2. It uses php 3. It polls 4. We have to call functions

Nonetheless, this is a good idea and the first version works! That matters :)

Yeah it’s not really possible for it to work without calling functions, as that’s how the developer console functions. Thanks for the feedback! I coded this ages ago and was surprised to see it on Hacker News!

PHP has been great lately, every person that bashes PHP and hasn't tried it in the last couple years should really give it a shot.

Should set background color to something that contrasts with the text color as not all browser consoles are a solid white.

Is there a demo? I turned off UBlock and HTTPs everywhere. Still nothing. (FF67 on Linux)

It's in the browser console. In chrome, that can be accessed by menu->more tools->developer tools

Ctrl+Shift+I should work in most browsers.

I'm a bit disappointed, I did domain = "news.ycombinator.com" and no one showed up to the party.

This is cursed since the mods are totally overwhelmed right now but it's super funny

I love everything about this.

Why the swearword filter ? Already got some toxic conversations here ?

Is there a way to get the browser console on mobile?

I'm not really sure what's special about this. Instead of showing chat messages in an element on the page, they are emitted via console.log().

I think there's a cuteness of it being hidden in the console. Who knows what site might have secret chat!

I think it's also an attempt at early web nostalgia.

It's not special but I did have quite a lot of fun pretending to be osama bin laden (and richard stallman)

It's nothing fascinating engineering wise. It's just clever and interesting to see.

It's a cool toy project people can play with. I'm surprised nobody ever did it before. It's so clever.

I wouldn't say nobody ever did it before... as it's not something incredibly novel... but it's still fun.

For example, while playing Airmash (an web game posted here around Dec 2017, now dead but another implementation still exists in starma.sh ), some of us were using a private chat (it used websocket though)... and this chat could be loaded and used via the console from any site....

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