Social Features

Discussions

Book clubs have dedicated discussion rooms where members can chat about the current book, suggest future books, or just talk in general. There are two types of discussions:

1. Pinned discussions
2. Book-specific discussions (e.g., a discussion for a specific book)

You can see the book club books guide for more information about book-specific discussions, however the pair function almost identically. The main difference is the internal detail of the book relationship.

Chat Features

The discussion rooms support basic chat features, such as:

• Non-live chat (messages are only fetched when the page is loaded or manually refreshed)
• Reactions (emoji-based, with support for custom emojis)
• Inline replies
• Threaded discussions

Future Improvements

While Stump is notably not a chat application, I will try to make these as functional as possible while still keeping the scope reasonable. Some features that I think would be nice to have:

• Editing and deleting messages
• Live chat (currently, messages are only fetched when the page is loaded or manually refreshed)
• Better UX for message actions (e.g., double-tapping to edit, etc.)
• @mentions with notifications and other typical chat-like features
• Inline markdown support, mostly for things like spoilers and inline emojis

Import Disclaimer

The chat features are not and will not be designed to be a secure messaging platform. It is purely meant for casual discussions around books, and should not be used for anything that requires a high level of security or privacy. Messages are stored in plaintext in the database without encryption, and there are no plans to change this.

Of course, you own your data so it isn’t like a third party is snooping on your messages, however I still want to make it very clear that this is not an intentionally secure messaging platform.