Shoutbox functionality in Confluence?

Question

I've been looking through addons and playing with macros to try to create something similar to a shoutbox for Confluence.

I haven't been able to find something similar, however. I don't particularly need usernames to be associated with it, but I would like to have a streamlined widget on our departments' portal pages where they can swiftly post updates without the bulky blog fussery.

I've tried to see if this is possible with page comments and tasklists, but I can't find a way to really make them work.

Optimally, I'd like to be able to have an editable field on the page (like a tasklist), that will allow a couple lines of text to be added to a box on the page. I don't want the department leads to need to edit the page directly in order to accomplish this.

Is there a combination of tasklist functionality and other parameters/macros that can accomplish something like this? I've been looking like crazy!

Thanks!

unknown · Answer

This is something we're using in another capacity, though it is certainly functionality that I like. Because status updates are "global," and the solution we're looking for is space-specific, it doesn't quite fit the bill, though we do enjoy the statuses (we use the recently-updated macro for them, though, as the status list macro is a little lackluster on the parameters).

Thanks for your suggestion!

Matt · Answer

How about using Status Updates and diaplying them on a Confluence page using the User Status List Macro?

unknown · Answer

Unfortunately, blog post functionality doesn't help much. It isn't a matter of the users not knowing how to utlize the blog posts or how to quickly add one, but more an efficiency measure for short (think tweet-sized) posts and comments. Each department tends to use their blogs for more substantial updates throughout the day, and "spamming" them with the shorter posts would be obnoxious and ultimately detrimental to the process we have set up.

I know we could use two different macros and sort them with tags, but that's adding another step (adding tags) to the process that we just don't want to deal with.

If there's something similar to a create-page macro that automagically adds in the tags, paired with a macro that would allow blog posting directly on the page (without having to change to another page to do it), that might work.

Thank you!

(Might try playing with the html macro, but I haven't tried it with this particular goal in mind, so I'm not sure how it'll go.)