1091382 - Consider installing Review Together extension on MozReview (TogetherJS integration)

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(MozReview Graveyard :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

Review Together[1] is an extension for Review Board that uses TogetherJS to allow participants on a page on Review Board to chat in real-time - both via text and voice - and allows participants to show their cursors and scroll positions on a page. It adds a "Chat" button to the menu for people to use. This is an unobtrusive extension, and will not change the experience for people who do not use the Chat button.

Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEfbREmTBjc

The extension needs a little bit of sprucing up, since it was mostly an experiment until recently, but it shouldn't take too much effort to get it in a decent shape.

I think this might be really interesting to use for collaborative reviews, or even training reviews for prospective peers.

[1] https://github.com/reviewboard/rb-extension-pack/tree/master/review_together

Comment 1

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

That's *hot*.

This is a real game changer and something we should look into deploying, especially if it is low effort.

On the other hand, part of me feels like we should be focusing on cleaning up the existing UX, especially around multiple review request interaction, before we add yet more complexity.

Can you elaborate on what all is involved in setting this up? Do we need to run an additional media server or something? What are the security implications?

Comment 2

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️)]

(In reply to Gregory Szorc [:gps] from comment #1)
> That's *hot*.

:D

> 
> This is a real game changer and something we should look into deploying,
> especially if it is low effort.

I think we'd just need to work out and test for security on confidential bugs. If there are problems around there, that'd be the hardest part. Getting this ready for testing and deploying on reviewboard-dev could be done in an evening.

> 
> On the other hand, part of me feels like we should be focusing on cleaning
> up the existing UX, especially around multiple review request interaction,
> before we add yet more complexity.
> 

I agree. There is much work, but I don't want to lose this idea.

> Can you elaborate on what all is involved in setting this up? Do we need to
> run an additional media server or something? What are the security
> implications?

Here are the steps:

1) If desired, somebody needs to clean up and merge in the code from https://reviews.reviewboard.org/r/6194/ into the extension for showing the scroll position of other positions.
2) If desired, somebody needs to set up an instance of the TogetherJS hub server for the extension to connect against. The extension will default to the Mozilla Hub server that all users of the TogetherJS library default to. We'll probably want our own for greater fail control. Instructions for that are in the README.md here[1].
3) An egg for the extension should be created and installed on the development machine for us to kick the tires. This might involve some iterations and might constitute the bulk of the work for security things.
4) If / when we're happy with it, and security is happy with it, we can install the extension on the production instance.

[1]: https://github.com/reviewboard/rb-extension-pack/blob/master/review_together/README.md

Comment 3

[Mark Côté [:mcote]]

We have too many P1s, so I'm spreading out the priorities.  P3 -> P4, P2 -> P3, and some portion of P1s will become P2.

Comment 4

[BMO Automation]

MozReview is now obsolete. Please use Phabricator instead. Closing this bug.