Guest chat

[MarcelWaldvogel]

When sharing documents using a link with users (e.g. sharing LOOL/Collabora online documents read/write), the guest has no possibility to use the chat. This is a request for an enhancement. (Maybe as part of OSSdev.)

Expected behavior

1. The admin enables granting guest chat (see below), globally or to some groups
2. The user shares a link and has the option to enable chat on this link; sends this link to guests
3. This also creates a XMPP MUC room for that share, which would be a starting position for group discussions (and forking 1:1 discussions). The user who created the share would become a permanent member of the group (bookmarked as auto-join) with admin rights, so the user can maintain order
4. Guests opening the link in their browsers will be presented with a MUC window (and hidden roster); have the option to change their nickname (and maybe open 1:1 chats)

Admin configuration

The admin enables guest chats (and has tokens enabled). On a new guest access, a new (temporary) JID of the form guest-${RANDOM}@${XMPP_DOMAIN} would be created.

This is easy to set up but would give the guest unrestricted access to the XMPP federation, unless the admin restricts this.

A possible ejabberd configuration might look as follows (untested):

acl:
  local_guest:
    user_regexp: "^guest-"
  …
access_rules:
  s2s:
    - deny: local_guest
    - allow
  …
s2s_access: s2s

Notes

This would also be useful for other JSXC-based apps.

[poVoq]

However it seems guest support in most XMPP servers restricts federation, so guests would not be able to chat with people using an XMPP account from another server.

[MarcelWaldvogel]

Which XMPP server, the one hosting the guest or a remote one? How does an XMPP server automagically know what a guest is? (That's what the local_guest rule is meant to tell the local XMPP server.)

[poVoq]

https://www.ejabberd.im/Anonymous-users-support

[DanScharon]

I'd definitely prefer a solution with a dedicated virtual xmpp domain with ephemeral throwaway/guest accounts as it leads to less clutter within your "real" domain. The ejabberd example that @poVoq posted looks good.

[DanScharon]

this would be an example configuration with prosody: https://prosody.im/doc/anonymous_logins

[MarcelWaldvogel]

That requires Multi-Domain support for JSXC ;) I agree, it is cleaner.