Why should you use Rocket Chat

Rocket.Chat is a Web Chat Server, developed in JavaScript, using the Meteor fullstack framework.It is a great solution for communities and companies wanting to privately host their own chat service or for developers looking forward to build and evolve their own chat platforms.

• IRC Federation - Alpha stage
  It’s now possible to use Rocket.Chat to send and receive messages from an IRC server. The IRC server can also join and participate on channels from the Rocket.Chat server. Direct messages between users from both servers are also available.
  With this feature, which is still in the early stages of its implementation, we are looking to have a better and stable implementation; as ever all contributions are welcome.
  This feature will also be our inaugural Feature Spotlight, coming soon to the blog. Watch this space!
  
• Youtube Broadcasting
  This new feature adds an integration between Rocket.Chat and Youtube Live, when enabled and set up, your channel owners will be able to broadcast their camera feed live to the Livestream feature which allows all users on the channel to watch a common stream.
  
  • WebDAV (Nextcloud/ownCloud) Storage Server Option
    New option for file storage using WebDAV that allows any storage service compatible with WebDAV to be used as storage for Rocket.Chat uploads and avatars. NextCloud and OwnCloud are the 2 main services tested using this new integration option.
  
  
• Don’t ask me again checkbox on hide room modal
  Now it’s possible to remember your choices in certain confirmation modals, for example, you can bypass the confirmation everytime you want to hide a chanel. It’s possible to revert the Don't ask me again at user’s profile page.

• Optional AWS access key and secret optional for S3 uploads
  It’s now possible to use AWS S3 for storage without credentials since the AWS SDK will try to receive the credentials automatically in certain cases, when running in a EC2 for example.
  
• Updated WeDeploy deployment
  Users can now deploy to WeDeploy by just clicking on Deploy at WeDeploy at our Readme.md file.
  

• Button to remove closed LiveChat rooms
  Sometimes the LiveChat administrators want to remove the LiveChat closed room history from their database. This is now possible when the user is logged in as a LiveChat manager. To remove a closed LiveChat room, the user only needs to navigate the sidebar in LiveChat -> Current chats.

• Send LiveChat visitor navigation history as messages
  The purpose of this feature is to send the navigation history of the LiveChat visitor as a message. Using this feature, the agent who joins the chat will be notified each time the visitor’s navigation is changed. By default, this feature is disabled. To activate it, simply access the LiveChat administrative panel:

So, the information about the navigation will be displayed as a message into the LiveChat room, but the visitor will not be notified:

APIs

• REST API endpoints permissions.list and permissions.update & Deprecated endpoint permissions 2 new endpoints were added to REST API v1, permissions.list and permissions.update. The old endpoint permissions was deprecated and will be removed in the future.
  
• REST API endpoint channels.setDefault New endpoint to REST API v1 channels.setDefault to set channel as default for new users.
  

Performance

We have been adding some improvements to our performance, the first wave was related to monitoring using Prometheus, reducing the amount of unnecessary websocket connections and reducing the amount of DDP calls for non-logged users.

• Add prometheus port config If you are running Rocket.Chat and want to monitor the internal details of methods, sessions, etc., it’s possible to connect Prometheus to the Rocket.Chat instances and now it’s possible to configure the port you want to grab the information from in case the default port 9100 is already in use.
  
• Disconnect users from websocket when away from the login screen for 10min From this version users who spend 10 minutes away (without focus) from the login screen will have their websocket disconnected. The connection will be restored as soon the user focuses on the page again.
  This prevents the multitude of unnecessary connections to the backend. At open.rocket.chat we reduced the amount of unauthenticated connections from thousands to a few hundred.
  

• Reduce the amount of DDP API calls on login screen The login screen was requesting unnecessary data which was making the process busy when lots of unlogged users were accessing the login screen.

Bug fixes

We fixed lots of bugs for this release, including:

• Livechat icon with status

Before:
After:
(#11177)

• Wordpress OAuth not providing enough info to login The /settings.oauth API endpoint was not listing all of the Wordpress OAuth settings. (#11152)
  
• /groups.invite not allow a user to invite even with permission The /groups.invite API was not checking if the user had permission to invite other users to any group, even if the inviter hasn’t joined it themself. (#11010)
  
• Message_AllowedMaxSize fails for emoji sequences The setting Message_AllowedMaxSize now counts emoji correctly. (#10431 by @c0dzilla)
  
• Rooms list sorting by activity multiple re-renders and case sensitive sorting alphabetically The rendering performance of the rooms list was improved and the sorting is now case insensitive. (#9959 by @JoseRenan)
  
• flex-tab icons missing (#11049)
  
• Exception thrown on avatar validation (#11009)
  
• Preview of large images not resizing to fit the area and having scrollbars (#10998 by @vynmera)
  
• Allow inviting LiveChat managers to the same LiveChat room
  (#10956)
  
• “blank messages” on iOS < 11 (#11221)
  
• “blank” screen on iOS < 11 (#11199)
  
• The process was freezing in some cases when HTTP calls exceeds timeout on integrations (#11253)
  
• Internal Server Error on first login with CAS integration (#11257)
   Build your chat server today
  

  Step by Step Guide to Install the Rocket Chat on CentOS 7