Immersive Messenger

Your members message each other all day on Discord, WhatsApp and iMessage. Then they come back to your forum and hit an inbox that reloads the page to show a new line of text. Immersive Messenger closes that gap: messages appear as they are sent, you see who is typing, and a private conversation finally feels alive.

The part that makes it safe to install​

It adds no conversation tables of its own. Every message lives in your existing XenForo direct message data, exactly where it already is. Nothing is migrated when you turn it on, your members find their old conversations waiting, and if you ever disable the add-on the conversations are still there, in the native inbox, intact. You are adding an interface, not replacing your data.

What your members get​

• An app-like interface, with a floating dock rather than a page they have to navigate to.
• Real-time delivery, Pusher compatible, with automatic polling fallback when Pusher is not configured.
• The signals that make chat feel like chat. Typing indicators, presence, read receipts.
• Expressive conversations. Reactions, inline edit and delete, mentions, GIFs and voice messages.
• Search that finds a message instead of a conversation.

For you, running it​

Moderation and permissions per user group, so you decide who gets the messenger, who can send voice, and who cannot. Everything a moderator could already do with native direct messages still applies, because they are still native direct messages.

Good to know​

Requires XenForo 2.3 and PHP 8.0 or later. Sub second delivery uses Pusher, which is optional: without it the add-on falls back to polling, and everything still works.