About BareRTC
This chat room software is called BareRTC and this page contains information about the software and how to use it.
BareRTC is an open source project released under the GNU General Public License with code available here.
About {{AsHTML .Config.Title}}
{{AsHTML .Config.Title}} is the name of this particular BareRTC server. The administrator may have left some links to more info below:
- Website: {{.Config.WebsiteURL}}
Help & Support
Tour of the user interface
Pictured: Screenshot of the user interface on tablet or desktop-sized screens.
Pictured: Screenshot of the mobile interface
Above are screenshots of how the chat room looks on desktop and mobile displays, respectively. For a description of some of the features pointed out above:
- Your camera controls: Clicking on the button will enable your webcam and your video may be watched by other people in the chat room. While broadcasting, you can Stop your webcam, Mute your microphone, and see who is currently watching you by clicking on the button, which will show the number of watchers inside the button itself.
-
The Who List shows all of the people who are currently connected
to the chat room. The Who List is global to the entire chat - it is the same list
of people no matter which Channel you are currently looking at. In the Who List
you may also find buttons to open a Direct Message (DM) or tune in to somebody's
webcam if they are currently broadcasting.
- This button will open their profile page, if they have one.
- This button will open a Direct Message (DM) chat with this person.
- This button will open the user's webcam, if they are broadcasting. A blue button means they're live, a red means their video feed is marked NSFW or explicit. A greyed out button means they are not currently broadcasting their video.
- The Channels & DMs panel lists the available public chat channels you may participate in as well as any currently open DMs for private one-on-one chats with other people. Some channels may have red notifications beside them to indicate unread messages have appeared.
- The Message entry box at the bottom of the screen is how you type a message and send it to the currently selected Channel or DM conversation.
-
In the upper right, the Settings button
will show some chat settings. Some interesting features in there include:
- Video scaling: you can make the webcam videos larger on your screen to see your chat partners in better detail.
- Sound effects: by default it plays a sound when you receive a new Direct Message but you can also turn on sound effects for public chat messages and when people join or exit the room. If the chat room is currently empty, you could set a sound effect when somebody joins so you know there may be someone to chat with then!
On mobile web browsers that don't have large enough screens to show everything at once, the Chat Room screen is shown by default and buttons appear in the corners to get to the two side panels (to change channels or manage your DMs, and to see Who Is Online and tune in to their webcams, respectively).
Supported browsers
Currently, BareRTC works best on Chromium browsers (including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, and other Chromium derivatives) as well as Mozilla Firefox.
It works in these browsers on desktop operating systems (including Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux) as well as on Android devices.
Unfortunately, the chat does not work on Apple's mobile devices such as the iPad and iPhone -- but research on this is underway and hopefully iOS devices will be supported soon!
Feature support matrix of browsers currently tested:
| Device Type | Web Browsers | Chat works? | Video works? |
|---|---|---|---|
| All Desktops | Mozilla Firefox | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| All Desktops | Chromium (Chrome, Edge) | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Mac OS Desktop | Safari | ✔️ | ❌ |
| Android | Mozilla Firefox | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Android | Chromium (Vanadium) | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| iPhone & iPad | All browsers | ❌ | ❌ |
Webcam sharing
The WebRTC technology used by this chat room allows for direct, peer to peer connections between you and the other chat members to stream video and audio directly to one another, without needing a server in the middle to relay all that data. In many cases, WebRTC should "just work" but you may run into trouble broadcasting if your local network is heavily firewalled (for example on a corporate or school network).
In many WebRTC video apps (such as Zoom, Jitsi, Google Hangouts, etc.), when one or both parties are on such difficult networks, a server in the middle is used to transfer the video data between them. BareRTC does not have any such server, as the bandwidth costs to carry your video could get expensive! If your video sharing is not working, it's unfortunate but you should still be able to have text chat conversations as normal.
Notice: because of the peer-to-peer nature of the webcam feature, it is possible that your chat partner may discover your IP address if they check their local computer's connections. This is true of all WebRTC-based video chat systems. Also, it is possible that your chat partner may "screen record" your video -- also true of all video sharing systems. Please inform a moderator if you know somebody is violating your privacy in this way so that they may be banned from the chat room.
Styling Your Messages
BareRTC supports Markdown syntax for your chat messages. You can make text bold by putting asterisks around part of it, **like this** or make text italic with *single asterisks*.
Hyperlinks you paste that begin with https:// will be clickable as-is, or you can create a custom
label for it by typing e.g. [click my link](https://www.wikipedia.org/).
To learn more about Markdown, please check out the Markdown Guide website.
Privacy
Some of the privacy considerations with this chat room include:
- The server does not maintain long-term state of chat history. Messages are pushed out as soon as they come in.
- However, the server does keep temporary log files to help the server admin troubleshoot issues and check on the health of the server. These logs may include chat messages sent to public channels. Private chat (DMs) are not logged by default. If the server is running in debug mode (which provides a ton of telemetry to diagnose issues), the contents of DMs may be logged since debug mode will record the low-level chat protocol messages sent between the server and clients.
- Chat moderators DO NOT get to see the contents of your Direct Message conversations - that feature is not programmed in to this chat room. The server logs which might capture your conversations are usually not actively monitored. Consider taking your especially sensitive conversations to a different platform if you are very concerned about it.
- Webcam sharing is peer-to-peer so it is possible that your chat partner could identify your IP address by checking their computer's open connections. But this is true of basically all WebRTC webcam services and is part of how WebRTC works.
- As with all video sharing services, it is always possible that your chat partner may screen record their computer and thus record a copy of your video. This is a risk inherent with all video sharing platforms - you can't control what software the other party may be running, so choose your risk tolerance accordingly.