Show HN: Drop-In Chat – Chatify your app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Drop-In Chat – Chatify your app

dropinchat.com

49 pointsahochhaus45 comments

WARNING: DO NOT TRY TO CHAT WITH PEOPLE - BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN - READ BELOW

Uhh, it's possible to inject Javascript into this. There are two people that already did this. One is harmless and alerts "Wufff!" and the other redirects you to pornhub.

[edit] Now there's another that redirects you to lemonparty.

[edit 2] Now there's another that redirects you here. It's fun watching this play out live, with the nice vs. the mean HNers.

This is a common mistake tons of developers do.

Pro-tip: Escape all user input either when it's going into the system or when it's going back out to be displayed!

Maybe not everyone knows this, it's called XSS. There is a good cheat sheet to protect against issues like this from OWASP : https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_(Cross_Site_Scripting)_P...

Shameless plug: We develop a tool that detects vulnerabilities such as this automatically (even in JavaScript based web apps) - https://www.netsparker.com/netsparker/

There is also a free community edition which would possibly detect this vulnerability : https://www.netsparker.com/communityedition/

Drop-In Chat had a few different XSS flaws. They should all be fixed now. Thanks for finding them and pointing them out!

Sorry for the slow security fix, I was traveling after leaving YC Hacks. Please do let me know if you find anything else wrong.

Does anyone know a good open-source version of this type of functionality. I have a client now that wants me to add this to their site but the data cannot go through a third-party company.

My stack is django-based but I am open to any solution that works well.

If you are willing to build on go, we open sourced the "wc" (WebChannel) library which handles all of the messages for dropinchat.

http://gopkg.in/samegoal/wc.v0

Also, out of curiosity, if dropinchat provided a virtual appliance so that you didn't need to send the messages off network would that address your security concerns?

You can take a look at Mozilla's TogetherJS (https://togetherjs.com/). It has a chat functionality and you can host it on your own.

I wrote an open source XMPP-based chat client: https://conversejs.org

There is a Django add-on for it as well: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-conversejs

In the latest unreleased version (0.8), you only have to load converse.min.js and converse.min.css in your HTML.

The 0.8 release should go out within the next few weeks.

Try Jappix mini (https://mini.jappix.com/). Uses XMPP instead of reinventing the wheel once again.

Also, if you need a generic chat, try Candy (https://candy-chat.github.io/candy/). Again, XMPP-based.

Very nice, I'll be keeping an eye on this. I'm sure you guys have a million other things to do, but don't forget handling multiple tabs by the same user.

e: Ah, and somebody's already trying to inject javascript. You rascals ;)

Thanks for the feedback. Please keep it coming if you think of anything else. We will be prioritizing what to work on.

I do need a messaging service for my product! Can it be used in production currently? I'm also curious about whether you provide the video conference api in the future or not? That would be useful!

Hi waitingkuo. Thanks for the encouragement. Currently I wouldn't recommend using Drop-In Chat in a production context as the code is too new and not really stable. When we get to the point we think the product is ready for production use we'll make an announcement.

At this point we do not have plans to add video conferencing support.

I don't have a use for this right now but it looks like a nice and simple solution.

Not that I necessarily think I would need to but is it possible for the webmaster to get logs of the chats?

One of the app authors here. We did this for YC hacks and ran out of time (30 hours). At this point we don't store the chats for anything but we plan on adding that soon. At that point, the admin should be able to search.

Please let us know if we can do anything to improve the app for a possible use case for you.

The only thing I can think of right now would be a way to theme it. Just being able to change the colour of the solid bar would be nice.

Thanks! We will add CSS styling to the configuration options in the DIC variable. Let us know if you think of anything else.

A public chat channel where everybody can write and read would be nice!

Thanks Walkman. That is a good idea. We had thought of group chats and chat rooms but a public "broadcast to all" option is interesting too. Kind of like a default room that everyone is in. Is that what you are saying?

I thought about channels, but the first would be a "public" channel where everybody joins by default and it cannot be deleted.

Makes sense, thanks for the clarification.

Sorry for the XSS problems. They are fixed now so it is safe to visit and test again if you like. Thanks owenversteeg for warning everyone.

This is awesome. I've been searching for a SaaS chat widget like this for years.

Any ideas on pricing?

For the time being we are going to keep this completely free to gauge interest. At some point we would likely charge, but at this point don't have solid plans about what the pricing would look like. Sorry I can't be more precise.

Is this similar to http://gochat.us/ ?

Hehe built something like this as a small project a while ago for fun...interlude.im

Hi, I just checked out interlude. Cool project.

I think the intent of our app is slightly different than yours. Our hope was to allow users of authenticated web applications to chat with one another. Our demo is misleading in this regard as all visitors to dropinchat.com get dropped into a single "chat group" (we din't want users to need to register in order to try it out). We think that apps this product might work well with are enterprise style collaborative applications (where users are already authenticated).

Fair enough :) Good luck!

Very cool app. Needs a little bit of maturing but a really good first step!

Thanks for the encouragement. What we have is certainly just a first step. We will continue to keep making incremental improvements now that YC Hacks is over.

What does this use in the backend? Is this xmpp-based? Is it open source?

The back end is golang. The client server messaging protocol is BrowserChannel/WebChannel.

https://code.google.com/p/libevent-browserchannel-server/wik...

We open sourced the BrowserChannel library here:

https://github.com/samegoal/wc

And have a chat room demo app here:

https://github.com/samegoal/wcchat

The code we used for this particular site isn't Open Source yet. We are still trying to figure out what we want to do with it before we make that decision.

Good luck with it. I hope you open source it.

Would you be able to give a rationale on why you chose against xmpp?

Hi scrollaway. Thanks for the support.

XMPP seems really great in a context of needing to inter-operate with other servers. However, for our use-case all communication was in a silo of a single site so this was not a major benefit to Drop-In Chat.

Our team wants broad broad browser support (for legacy corporate deployments) and a well-tested client side module. BrowserChannel, which is used for gmail chat, is very widely deployed and well tested.

Maybe I'm missing something, but even if we went with XMPP, wouldn't Drop-In Chat still need a way to stream messages from the server to the client? If so, we would still need to rely on a transport mechanism like websockets/XHR streaming/forever iframes for the in-browser real time message delivery. BrowserChannel/WebChannel bundles up this abstraction nicely and hides all the ugliness of dealing with browser quirks for streaming message delivery.

Sure, but BrowserChannel is only relevant on the client. What about the server? Using XMPP would allow for external clients to connect for example.

I agree. If at some point dropinchat.com allowed for messaging between networks XMPP support would be great to add. At this point we only allowing for messaging other drop in chat users so no such protocol is needed. My only point was that we didn't "reinvent the wheel" by not using XMPP. Instead we just don't allow cross network messaging yet.

Do you guys know about https://chatango.com ? It's a more mature product, also based on Go backend. Founder here, so please ask any questions.

Shameless advertising much?

Also joined 2 mins ago.

Shameless hijacking and also just not as good..

I looked at chatango and I think the intended use case is a bit different than dropinchat. Drop-in chat provides user-to-user instant messaging. As best I can tell, chatango (primarily?) provides broadcast style communication. Is this correct?

Chatango is primarily focused on group chats, but you can send private messages as well. Dropinchat.com mentions "chat groups". Are they only for user-to-user messages?

At this point dropinchat.com does not support sending messages to more than one user. However, we do plan to add that feature as our team has time.

The documentation on dropinchat.com mentions "groups" as a set of users which are allowed to see one another and message back and forth. Our team thinks this use case might be helpful, for example, for a website administrator to limiting communication between members on a given organizational team or individuals in a certain building, etc.

Oh it's written in Go? That's so cool! Can you tell us more? Maybe do a Show HN some time.

Frontpage talks about chat and opportunity to get wife from Asia. Maybe you should consider go down a bit with ads?

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