Guests
TalkJS supports a lightweight access mode to a conversation called ‘guest access’.
A guest is a user who can read all messages, send messages, and perform message actions in a conversation, but is not a member of a conversation. This means that, among other things, guests cannot be @mentioned, cannot receive email and SMS notifications, and will not appear in conversation's participant list.
For a full overview of the differences between participants and guests in group chats, see: Participant access and guest access.
You can have many more guests than participants in your group chat. This opens up a few use cases, such as the ones described below.
There are several use cases for using guests in group chats, including large group chats and real-time chat supervision.
With guest access you can have hundreds or even thousands of users chatting at once. Guest access allows you to reach the maximum number of users in a single group chat that is available on your plan. You can have as many large group chats as the number of active users on your plan allows.
Opening a conversation as a guest enables a supervisor or arbiter to join and inspect a chat without disturbing the conversation flow. If the Inbox UI is used, the guest's inbox will stay clean, because conversations you join as a guest are not added to the conversation list. Guests are able to follow a conversation in real time, and also write messages.
To enable guest access for group chats, see: Enable guest access.
Guests always have full read-write access to a conversation. That means that if you enable guest access, anyone who knows the ID of a conversation can enter that conversation as a guest.
For more information on guest access permissions, see: Access rights for group chats.