Aggressive Live Helper Chat Configuration

[aykaramba]

1. Live Helper Chat is built based on the following principle: Polite Configuration.

Under this configuration principle, the visitor is king and must always be in control. All conversations are considered "invitations" and users are expected to ask questions when they have them.

2. I am building a site with the following principle: Aggressive Configuration.

Under this principle:

• I am building a site for very small audience with only a few visitors. I don't care about bots, I don't have staff, I am going to be watching my chat dashboard at all times. I don't care if my browser is pinging me all day long with passer by visitors.

• Chat is the primary component of the website, the content is secondary at best.

• Users do not get the option to turn off the chat widget. Chat is always visible (embedded) and is the primary focus of the content.

• Likewise, when a chat is ongoing, users don't get the option to end the chat. Chats are never ending streams, no user can end a chat under any circumstance.

• Users do not have any option about when a chat begins. When the page loads the chat widget automatically starts a conversation and all chats need to automatically present the user with a greeting, assign the chat to me and open it up for conversation right away.

3. Questions:

a) My main challenge is how to get the chat widget to automatically start a conversation. The current default behaviour (I have not found a check box for this) is to politely wait for the user to post a question, at which point the conversation is queued up and waiting for an operator to pick it up. I think I only need the chat widget to load up and automatically start a new conversation so that I get a notification in the control panel.

Since I don't see any settings component that would allow for this, I was thinking that a piece of javascript can be written to post either some blank characters or some default message and hit submit on the existing widget form.

Question: Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reliably hack something together to get it to work this way? Is there a feature in setting that I might have missed that could be used for this?

b) I need to disable the ability for users to close the chat window or end the conversation. I also don't see anything in setting that would allow for this. I was thinking of using css to hide the buttons somehow.

Question: Does anyone have any suggestions on how to hack a solution to this? Would hiding the buttons via css make sense? How to deliver this css, can we deliver it as style sheet snippets with the code snipped provided for the widget?

Live Helper Chat is unbelievably powerful and my favourite solution in this space. I absolutely love that it provides the ability to embed the widget into the design it self. Amazing.

Any help and suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!

[remdex]

1. Auto start chat can be turned on in "Start chat form settings" make sure you do not require any field there also.
2. Most of close chat actions can be hidden from widget theme configurations.
3. In widget theme you can also enable show previous chat messages so for visitors it will look like chat continuation always.

[aykaramba]

Hi!

Thank you kindly for such a quick follow up. I did a clean install and started from scratch. Details:

1. This works pretty well in testing.
2. How do I completely hide the "end chat" (x icon) in the gear to the left of the input field? I tried putting this css in the custom css section of the widget theme:

.close-ico {display: none;}

That doesn't seem to work. Any suggestions?
3. This also works great for returning visitors

You should be really proud of your solution. It is one of the most comprehensive and powerful solutions on the market. Truly impressive work.

[remdex]

You can control x options from widget themes

[aykaramba]

Aha! There it is. For anyone wondering, make sure to use !important in your css modifications to override css styling. For example, I wanted to hide the "end chat" icon, I put this in the "Custom Css --> Widget body additional CSS, takes effect after save" text box:

.close-ico {display: none!important;}

Absolutely fantastic software. thanks @remdex !