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.

Use cases

There are several use cases for using guests in group chats, including large group chats and real-time chat supervision.

Large group chats

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.

Real-time supervision

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.

Permissions

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.