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I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

commonroom.chat

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

#11
Really wanted to enjoy this, but it seemed like the room size of 5 was way too small. People would pop in and out endlessly hoping for some bustle but none seemed to be able to build.

What chat I did get really recreated the 14 year old edgelords in chatrooms experience though. Lots of porn gif spamming

Re: I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

#12
2 observations:

I couldn't figure out what my username was, I had to ask in the chat.

It's possible to embed recursive iframes, so I can see that being exploited for bad things.

Otherwise I like the idea. People in the chat were nice, but I can't help but think that soon chat rooms will be full of chatGPT bots and nobody will be any the wiser!

Re: I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

#13

2 observations: I couldn't figure out what my username was, I had to ask in the chat. It's possible to embed recursive iframes, so I can see that being exploited for bad things. Otherwise I like the idea. People in the chat were nice, but I can't help but think that soon chat rooms will be full of chatGPT bots and nobody will be any the wiser!

Thank you for the feedback!

So far from users I've heard they want:

1) username visibility fix making sure all colors are visible 2) removal of xss 3) ability to see your own username (its just "you" rn) 4) dark mode

open to any and all suggestions :) my first full stack app. its cool seeing it being used

Re: I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

#14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I fix this? this is my first full stack app I've built and it's nice seeing users interact with the site

https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Cross_Site_Sc... Edit: this focuses on script tags and other means to inject code, but most defenses also work for other injected tags

thank you for this resource :) going to look into that.

first time figuring out opsec !

Re: I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

#15

Really wanted to enjoy this, but it seemed like the room size of 5 was way too small. People would pop in and out endlessly hoping for some bustle but none seemed to be able to build. What chat I did get really recreated the 14 year old edgelords in chatrooms experience though. Lots of porn gif spamming

Perhaps I might increase room limit to 10 users?

I'm trying to replicate the feeling of a hostel commonroom

Re: I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try escaping HTML submitted from the form. Or even simply detecting the presence of any HTML tag and rejecting such submissiobs with a friendly error message.

ah yes! i will do this in the next version. someone recomended leaving some of the xss elements like the image and video function with the old school chat vibes but I'm not sure what to do lmaooo

Old school chats and forums dealt with that with special limited markup language for formatting and embedding images or other special elements like youtube videos. Everything outside the limited markup options was treated as text with the replacement of to HTML entities < and > meant to display HTML special characters in text. It was called BBcode, if I recall correctly. It looked something like that:

[b]bold[/b] [i]italic[/i] [img]example.com/image.jpg[/img] [youtube]youtube.com/watch?v=someVideo[/youtube]

Re: I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

#18

Some user was able to open a browser modal with a custom message in everyones browser. Any ideas how they did that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting

The author of the site was naughty and didn't do any sanitization :) They said they've fixed it in another comment, though.

Re: I created an ephemeral group chat app for strangers

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can try escaping HTML submitted from the form. Or even simply detecting the presence of any HTML tag and rejecting such submissiobs with a friendly error message.

ah yes! i will do this in the next version. someone recomended leaving some of the xss elements like the image and video function with the old school chat vibes but I'm not sure what to do lmaooo

I like to use a small utility function like this and pass user input through it.

  function asTextContent(input) {
    const tempElement = document.createElement('span');
    tempElement.textContent = input;
    return tempElement.innerHTML;
  }
It will let the browser handle the escaping.
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