When You Need to Add Your Own Unique User Avatar

One of the Key features a chatter is looking for is adding an avatar next to his name.
RumbleTalk gives you the ability to change custom and control your user avatar.

In general, although they look the same, there are several types of avatars.
They are associated with the login option. let’s see what the options are.

User Avatar Default

Guest and Admins by default have default chat avatar. This avatar is showing when login in as guests or as admins. When changing the default avatar is needed, the chat owner can do it using CSS (it is simple, no worries).

To change the avatar, open the chat settings, go to the advanced design, click on the CSS icon and add the CSS code to your preferred chat. Note, you can change the avatar in both web view and mobile view. To see what you need to add, please click on the web/mobile link and go to number 1 tip in this links.

chat css avatar change

1) If you do not have your own image on the web, you can upload to the chat your image and right click on it to get the avatar link.
2) You can also change the default admin text color (by default admins are logged in with red colour).

How to change a managed user or admin avatar

Managed users are participants who log in with a username and password. These login credentials are created by the group chat owner, by the Register option or via the API when you sync your own userbase to the chat room.

Administrators, once created by the group chat owner, are given moderating authority. They can delete messages and disconnect or ban unruly users.

As a group chat owner, log in to your admin panel and select -> settings -> “User”.

chat settings

Add a new user with avatar

From there you can view the field to add your own image. This occurs in one of two ways.

  1. Upload Image – upload an image from your computer (recommended)
  2. Image URL – directly copy and paste an image URL

The default user avatar setting is 35×35 pixels but this can be changed using CSS.

Social avatar users

When a group chat owner allows users to log in with their social credentials, they will show in the chat with there social avatar (facebook or twitter).

See how it looks like!

See below how a user avatar user is displayed in the group chat.

user avatar in group chat

We’re happy to share with you this example of changing icons. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates on more new features.

New Feature: Customize your Mobile Chat using CSS

Since we launched RumbleTalk HTML chat service for websites. We tried to give our customers a full control over their HTML chat room look and feel. The service was built as a JavaScript chat on the client side with light HTML5 and CSS.

Back then the chat looked exactly the same in mobile and web. However, since mobile has special features and behaviour, we found out that web view was causing many mobile users to leave the chat. We then built the Mobile chat version of RumbleTalk which made a huge difference for customers and mobile usage.

When we started RumbleTalk, we created an “Advance design” feature, where people could change colors, background, borders, fonts, font size and more.

However, after a while, we understood that for advanced users and web designers, this was simply not enough. The requests for additional customization options came too often. So we decided to add the option to let customers design the entire HTML chat room look and feel using CSS. It meant back then that users will control any aspect of the chat design simply by letting them control over the CSS.

Web Design
Web Style Web Chat Design

In the example image above, we loaded new background using CSS. This is basically what a customer sees when he/she are using PC or laptop (using a web browser).

This was a big boost for RumbleTalk as web designers and website developers started to design special customized HTML chat room skins. It was a unique, fresh approach for designers that let them actually, design. It also meant that they could avoid using an off the shelf flash like chat rooms software that always looks strange with respect to their website design.

One more important point, web designers had the option now to design the chat room for customers with the exact look & feel of their website without compromising on the quality and look and feel. This made RumbleTalk very popular with web designer that expressed them self’s easily and were not forced to use a 3rd party chat software that has none or very limited customization options.

Mobile, here we come

When we were done with the Web CSS feature (Control the chat design for web browsers). We understood that the work is not finished. We knew that in order of giving a complete 360-degree solution, we will need to allow customers to change their mobile chat CSS as well.

We are happy to announce that this feature is now released. Yehaaaaee √√√

So, mobile CSS feature was launched last week. You can now create and customize your mobile chat design. Note, we gave some technical css tips in here to help you start the process of changing the most common items that customers often ask us about.

Quick Example of CSS design option.

To explain it better, let me start with the original idea, RumbleTalk comes with a default mobile theme that was not editable till now.

You may see below how we transform in 3 steps from the default mobile theme to a custom chat room theme.

mobile chat CSS design for websites

So, what do you see here in this example above ?

  1. First, you see on the left, the default design that is part of every chat room created.
  2. Then we loaded up the same background we had in the web chat design.
    See here the line we added.#chat { background: url(“https://rumbletalk-images-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/a78f4e7c872dbc2654ea3bb2238ef365/1448364119-colors.jpg”) no-repeat scroll left center; }
  3. Than we changed the header and foot colors.top-bar { background-color: #0373d1 !important; }
    #bottom { background-color: #0373d1 !important; }
  4. At last we increased the font size to 20px.#chat { font-size: 20px !important; }

Customize your Mobile Chat

admin panel mobile css design

Changing your mobile CSS is done in the advanced design menu, in a new tab called Mobile CSS.
You can control all the design aspects of the chat, mainly used to customize your mobile chat looks but also can help in adding functionality (limited though).

The most common request that we get from clients for mobile customization are:

Background

  • Changing the Top Bottom Bar color
  • Changing the chat background color

Fonts

  • Changing the Fonts size

Admin User

  • Changing the ADMIN image
  • Changing the ADMIN text color
  • Changing the default image of a guest user using CSS