Chat Rooms

A chat room is a persistent, real-time group conversation that lives at a fixed URL on your site. Anyone with access opens the page and steps into the existing room with its full history, rather than starting a new thread. Members come and go; the room stays. It is the difference between a Slack channel and a one-off DM.

Chat rooms are the right shape for topic-based community discussion, live event lobbies, course cohorts, customer support drop-ins, team backrooms, alumni networks, fan communities, and anything else where the conversation needs to outlive any single member.

How it works

Each chat room is a WordPress custom post type (bpbm-chat). You create it in WP Admin → Better Messages → Chat Rooms, configure who can read it and who can reply, and embed it on any page, post, or page-builder block with a single shortcode:

[better_messages_chat_room id="123"]

When a logged-in user visits that page they see the running conversation immediately. Messages they post appear instantly to everyone else viewing the same room (WebSocket version) or within the next polling cycle (free version). Guests can be allowed to read, allowed to participate, or kept out entirely — per room.

The room itself has no public URL — it always renders inside a page or post you control via the shortcode. Embed the same room on the homepage for guests, on a members-only page behind a membership plugin, on a course-cohort page, or inside a BuddyPress group — the conversation, participants, and history are shared across every embed.

Key capabilities

Access & visibility

• Public, gated, or invite-only rooms — controlled per room via the Role Based Access panel
• Optional guest entry: unregistered visitors can read, reply, or both
• Per-role permissions for Can Join, Can Reply, and Auto Add
• Hide a room from the user's inbox if it should only appear at the embed location
• Close a room with one toggle to freeze it while keeping history visible

Conversation & presence

• No participant cap
• Online users sidebar showing who is currently in the room
• Typing, recording, and uploading indicators (WebSocket version)
• Read receipts, mentions, replies, edit/delete/forward
• Full text search across all messages in a room
• Pinned messages and pinned conversations

Media & content

• File sharing with resumable uploads and direct-link protection
• Emoji selector, sticker packs, GIPHY / Klipy GIFs
• Embedded link previews and oEmbed for YouTube, Vimeo, Spotify, SoundCloud, and 20+ services
• Markdown text formatting and inline code blocks
• Voice messages (separate add-on plugin)
• Voice and video calls inside the room, 1-on-1 or group up to 32 video / 50 audio participants (WebSocket version)

Administration

• Dedicated React admin under WP Admin → Better Messages → Chat Rooms with search, duplicate, and per-room delete
• Per-room participant management with name / login / email search
• Auto-join users when they visit the embed page
• Auto-remove inactive participants on a configurable cadence (details below)
• Automatic message cleanup — wipe a room on a daily or weekly schedule, or cap it at the latest N messages (details below)
• Mass messaging from WP Admin (broadcast to one or many rooms)
• Per-room moderation that inherits the site-wide pipeline — Pre-Moderation, AI Content Moderation, Bad Words Filter, and user-reported messages all apply to chat rooms by default

Embedding & navigation

• A single shortcode [better_messages_chat_room id="123"] to drop a room onto any page, post, or page-builder block
• Mini Widget tab listing every room the visitor belongs to, available on every page of the site
• The same room can be embedded on more than one page — the conversation, participants, and history are shared

Admin management

Chat rooms have a dedicated administration page at WP Admin → Better Messages → Chat Rooms where administrators can:

• Create, edit, and delete chat rooms
• Manage participants — add or remove users
• Search users by name, login, or email when adding participants

Selecting a room from the sidebar opens its editor with sections for Participants, Chat Room Settings, Automatic Message Cleanup, Role Based Access, Appearance, and Custom Texts.

Online users sidebar

Chat rooms include an expandable/collapsible sidebar panel that shows currently online members. A toggle button in the chat header allows users to show or hide the panel.

Participants list order

The participants list — in the conversation information panel and the online users sidebar — follows a site-wide order configured at WP Admin → Better Messages → Settings → Messaging → Group Conversation Settings:

• Join order — the default. Members appear in the order they joined the room.
• Alphabetical (A–Z) — members are sorted by display name. Guest users are sorted by their guest names right alongside registered members.

Sorting happens server-side against the plugin's user index, so the list stays fast even in rooms with tens of thousands of members.

A separate Show Online Members First toggle keeps currently online members pinned to the top of the list, with everyone else following in the chosen order below. It is enabled by default.

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Show Online Members First requires the WebSocket version — live presence data is only delivered over the realtime connection. The base sort order works in both the free and WebSocket versions.

The same setting orders the participants list of group conversations. Private 1-on-1 conversations are not affected.

Auto-remove inactive participants

Chat rooms can automatically prune participants who have stopped engaging, keeping participant lists, unread counts, and notification fan-out focused on people who actually use the room. The job runs on the existing five-minute cleaner cron — no extra schedule to configure.

Enable it per chat room under WP Admin → Better Messages → Chat Rooms → Chat Room Settings by toggling Auto-remove inactive users. Two more controls then appear:

• Inactivity threshold (days) — how many days of inactivity before a participant is removed. Default 30, minimum 1.
• Inactivity is measured by — pick one of three signals:
  • User has not visited the site — uses the user's last authenticated request anywhere on the site. Catches abandoned accounts.
  • User has not sent a message in this chat room — keys off messages posted in this thread only. Catches lurkers who are active site-wide but never participate here.
  • User has not opened this chat room — keys off the user's last visit to this specific chat. Catches uninterested participants.
• Apply to roles — restrict cleanup to participants whose role matches one of the checked boxes. The list shows every editable WordPress role plus a synthetic Guests entry for unauthenticated visitors registered through the guest-chat flow. Leave everything unchecked to keep the original "remove anyone" behavior.

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The most common case for Apply to roles is keeping auto-remove on but ticking only Guests — silent guest visitors get pruned and registered members are left alone.

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Every participant gets a built-in grace period equal to the Inactivity threshold before they become eligible for removal. A user who was just added to a room — by clicking Join, by an admin invitation, or via Auto join users — will not be purged until they have been a member for at least that many days, even if their site-wide last activity is older than the threshold. This prevents brand-new joiners from being deleted on the very next cron run.

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Removed users may rejoin if they meet the role requirements. If Auto join users is also enabled, an inactive user who later visits the page hosting the chat shortcode is auto-joined again automatically — that is the intended round trip: prune dormant, restore active.

AI chat bots are skipped automatically and never auto-removed.

Pin specific users

To prevent specific users (admins, room owners, guests of honor) from ever being auto-removed, drop the following into your theme's functions.php or a custom plugin:

add_filter( 'better_messages_clean_inactive_chat_users_exclude_user_ids', function( $ids ) {
    return array( 1, 42, 7 );
} );

Tune the per-cron batch size

By default the job removes up to 100 inactive participants per chat room per cron tick. To raise or lower that:

add_filter( 'better_messages_clean_inactive_chat_users_batch_size', function() {
    return 500;
} );

Setting the batch size to 0 disables the cleanup job entirely.

Automatic message cleanup

Chat rooms can delete their own messages automatically — either wiping the room on a fixed schedule or capping it at a maximum number of messages. Use it for daily-reset public lobbies, support drop-ins that should start every morning empty, or high-traffic rooms that should never accumulate unbounded history. Works in both the free and WebSocket versions.

Enable it per chat room under WP Admin → Better Messages → Chat Rooms → Automatic Message Cleanup by picking a Cleanup mode:

• Off — the default. Nothing is ever deleted automatically.
• Clear all messages on a schedule — every message in the room is deleted once the scheduled moment passes:
  • Cleanup frequency — Daily, or Weekly with a day-of-week picker
  • Cleanup time — interpreted in the site timezone (Settings → General → Timezone)
  • After each wipe a system notice — "Chat history was cleared automatically" — is posted in the room, so returning members understand why history is gone. The notice only appears when the wipe actually deleted something; a room with no new activity since the last wipe is left untouched.
  • The editor shows Next cleanup and Last cleanup timestamps under the time field.
• Keep only the latest messages — a rolling cap. Set Maximum messages to keep; whenever the room exceeds that number, the oldest messages are deleted until only the newest N remain. Trimming is silent — no system notice is posted.

Participants and room settings are never touched — only messages are deleted. Deletion is permanent, with no trash or undo, exactly like the manual Clear all messages button in the room's Danger Zone.

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Like all Better Messages maintenance jobs, cleanup runs on the five-minute cleaner cron. "Daily at 03:00" means "the first cron tick after 03:00" — on a low-traffic site that can be a few minutes later, or whenever the first visitor arrives. If exact timing matters, wire a real OS cron to wp-cron.php.

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Missed schedules collapse into a single wipe. If the site is offline for three days, the room is wiped once on the next cron run — not three times.

Large rooms are wiped in batches — up to 2,000 messages per cron tick by default — and resume on the next tick, so even a room with tens of thousands of messages cleans itself without timing out. Two filters tune the throughput:

add_filter( 'better_messages_auto_cleanup_max_batches', function() {
    return 40;
} );

add_filter( 'better_messages_auto_cleanup_batch_size', function() {
    return 200;
} );

Developers can react to every automatic cleanup via an action that receives the thread ID, chat room ID, mode (schedule or limit), and the number of deleted messages:

add_action( 'better_messages_chat_room_auto_cleanup', function( $thread_id, $chat_id, $mode, $deleted ) {
    error_log( "Chat room {$chat_id} cleanup ({$mode}) removed {$deleted} messages" );
}, 10, 4 );

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Looking for site-wide, age-based retention instead ("delete everything older than 90 days")? That is a separate global setting — see Auto-delete old messages.

How to enable

Chat rooms are managed through WP Admin → Better Messages → Chat Rooms.

Creating a chat room:

1. Click Add New to create a new chat room
2. Set the chat room name
3. Configure allowed roles (which user roles can join)
4. Optionally enable guest access for non-registered users
5. Publish the chat room

Embedding a chat room: Use the shortcode on any page or post:

[better_messages_chat_room id="123"]

Replace 123 with the actual chat room post ID.

Mini widget access

When the Chat Rooms mini widget is enabled under Better Messages → Settings → Mini Widgets, every page on your site gets a bottom-bar or floating-bubble tab that lists the rooms the current user belongs to.

See also

• Group conversations — multi-user threads that are not tied to a fixed page
• Auto-delete old messages — site-wide age-based retention for all conversations
• AI Chat Bots — drop an AI participant into any chat room
• Pre-moderation, AI Content Moderation, and Bad Words Filter — automated moderation that applies to chat rooms
• Report messages — let participants flag content for admin review
• Role-based access — the same role system that gates chat-room entry
• Guest access — let unregistered visitors participate in public rooms
• Mini widgets — surface chat rooms across every page of your site
• Video calls, Audio calls, and Group video chat — start a call directly inside a chat room (WebSocket version)