Quick Start Guide

In this quick start guide, we will learn some of the basic features of Dead Simple Chat. Each chapter in the contents is a self-contained topic, you can click on the link to learn about a specific topic or continue to read each topic one by one.

Creating and Embedding a Chat Room
Whitelabel and Custom Branding
Customizing the look and feel of a chatroom
Channels/Sub-Rooms
1 to 1 Chat / Private Chat
Single Sign-On

1. Creating and Embedding a Chat Room

a. Creating a Chat Room

When you log in to Dead Simple Chat the first page you see is called the Dashboard Page. To create a chatroom:

1. On the Dashboard page look at the bottom left-hand side corner you will find a "Create Chat Room" button click on it to create a Chatroom

2. On the left-hand side panel, look for the "Chat Rooms" button, click on it you will go to the Chat Rooms page, there on the top left-hand side there is "Create Chat Room" button

Once you click on the Create Chat Room button you will go to the Create Chat Room Page, there you can specify settings with regards to this chat room

a. Name: You can give any name to this chat room (This is for your reference only and will not be shown to chatroom users)

b. Description: You can give any description to this chat room (This is for your reference only and will not be shown to chatroom users)

c. Password Protected Chat Room: If you enable this option, a password will be required to enter the chatroom.

d. Q&A Mode/ Pre-Moderated Chat Room

In this mode, if someone sends a message in the chatroom it first appears to the moderator/admin and only after approval it does in the chatroom for everyone to see.

e. 1 to 1 Chat

In one to One chat participants can chat with each other. To initiate a chat just click on the username user with whom you want to chat. You can see the list of users in the side-bar or in the chatbox, you can click on their username in the chat messages to start a 1 to 1 conversation

1. Moderator Only 1 to 1 chat. In this only, the moderator can initiate a conversation with any of the users. Users cannot do 1-to1 chat among themselves

f. Channels/ Sub Rooms: Channels/ Sub-Rooms are chatrooms inside of a Chat Room. So you can have multiple chatrooms inside of the main chatroom to group the conversations based on some topic.

To learn more about Channels/Sub-rooms click HERE.

b. Embedding the chat room

After you have set-up your chatroom tabs for "customize" and or Channels/Sub-rooms appear, the last tab that appears is the "Embed Info".

Go to the Embed info section of your chatroom, there are two sections

1. Embed on your Website

2. Chat Room Details

Embed on your website

a. Changing the size and shape of the chatroom

Here you can set the Width and height of the chat room. You can decide to set the size of the chatroom in pixels or as a percentage. If you want a fixed size of the chatroom set the size is pixels. If you want the size of the chatroom to change with respect to the size of the website where you are embedding the chat choose the percentage option:

b. adding/embedding the chatroom to your website.

Below this, you will find the generated code. This is just an HTML iframe tag much like the one you get when you want to embed a youtube or a Vimeo video.

Just paste this HTML tag in your website's HTML where you want the chatroom to appear. If you are on WordPress, Wix or any other CMS click on the add custom HTML button and paste this code where you want the chatroom to appear

Chat Room Details

Here you can see the unique chatroom URL. You can open this URL in another browser. for example if you are using chrome open this is firefox or safari to view the chatroom as a user. Here you will also find the Chatroom ID also the name of the chatroom.

2. Whitelabel and Custom Branding

You can upload your own custom logo as well as a brand name in Dead Simple Chat. to do this click on the settings button in the left-hand side panel. It will take you to the settings page

a. Hide Dead Simple Chat Branding

White label chat is an add-on. contact us at support@deadsimplechat.com to purchase the add-on

b. Custom Bad words

Here you can add custom bad words that will not appear in the chat room. remember to add words one by one otherwise the system will assume multiple words as a single word. If you have a large list of words to add email them to us at support@deadsimplechat.com and we will add them for you

3. Customizing the look and feel of a chatroom

With Dead Simple Chat, you can customize the look of the chat room in an infinite number of ways. To customize from the dashboard page click the chatroom settings button of the chatroom you wish to customize.

Then click on the "customize tab" at the top and you will reach the customize page.

On the customize page there are 2 types of settings. On the top settings, there are some basic settings, if you want to quickly set up your chatroom, below that is the Advanced customization section there are a lot of settings in the advanced customization tab which you can do.

If you want to know what something is just click on the Show preview button beside each label to show a description on what it does

Below that is the Custom CSS box, if you need even more customization you can write your custom CSS in the box. Refer to our CSS Class guide for details here.

Below that is the embed instructions you can change the size of the chatbox here just click on the custom tab and change the height and width of the chatbox

When you are done customizing you can copy the customizations to other chatrooms that you might have created, refer to the "Copy customizations to another chat room" there click on the chatroom to which you want to copy the current CSS settings and click on the "Copy Customizations to Select Chat room Button"

4. Channels/Sub-rooms

To create channels/Sub-rooms, from the dashboard click on the chatroom settings button, then in the general tab click on the "Channels/Sub-rooms" checkbox to enable Channels, you can also click on the learn more button for a brief description of channels/sub rooms.

Basically, Channels/ Sub-Rooms are chatrooms inside of a Chat Room. So you can have multiple chatrooms inside of the main chatroom to group the conversations based on some topic.

then click on the "update chat room" button a new channels/sub rooms tab will popup on the header, click on it.

On the channels sub rooms page we have the following settings:

1. Show notifications for all channels:

When this checkbox is checked, a notification badge will be shown to the users and the notification will be sent to all the users in the chatroom for all the channels in the chatroom.

If this checkbox is unchecked, then the notification will be sent for only the channels the user opens.

This is helpful when you have multiple channels and you want the user to get notified whenever a message is sent in any of the chatrooms.

So, for e.g, if you have created 5 channels in the chatroom, and the user doesn't click on the channel name to open the channel in the chat they will not see the unread badge for messages sent in those channels.

2. Manage Channels

To create a channel in your chatroom just write the name of your channel in the text box and click on the add channel button.

A new row will be created below with

a. Name: Whatever name you gave to the channel, you can also change the name here.

b. Enable: by default the channel is enabled. you can disable it if you want and re-enable it again as required.

c. Notify all users. This setting is unchecked by default. when checked, if a message arrives in this channel a notification will be sent to all the users, regardless if they have opened this channel or not.

The default behaviour is not to send a notification if someone has never opened a channel.

d. Export: You can export the chats of this channel

e. Save settings: self-explanatory. always remember to click save changes otherwise your settings will not be saved.

f. Delete Channel: Delete channel deletes a channel this action cannot be undone.

5. 1-1 chat / Private Chat

To enable 1-1 chat from the dashboard page click on the chatroom settings button of the chatroom for which you want to enable 1-1 chat.

On the general settings page click on the 101 Chat (Private chat) to enable 1-1 chat.

To conduct 1-1 chat a user would have to click on the name of the person to start a conversation with them

They can either click on the person's name from the list on the left sidebar or they can click on the user's name in the chat message

refer to the image below

There is a moderator only feature also available. When enabled only; moderators will be able to chat with users and users will not be able to conduct one-one chat among themselves

After enabling the functionalities remember to click on the "Update Chat room" button to save your settings.

5. Single Sign-on

If you want users when they sign in to your website be automatically be logged in to chat, this can be done by Dead Simple Chat Sigle Sign-On functionality.

To learn more about single sign on refer to our developer documentation here: https://deadsimplechat.com/developer/

Final Words:

We are here for your success, if you face any problems with customization or implementation or if you have any questions/feedback please feel free to contact us. Our team is ready to help.

Email: Support@deadsimplechat.com

Phone: +1 (647) 812-7292