For members: rooms that feel like Discord, sitting next to your forums.
Open /rooms in any Mobieus community and you land in the room you were in last (or the first room your role allows). The composer is a textarea, so multi-line messages are easy. Enter sends. Shift+Enter is a new line. Type @ to mention someone and a dropdown autocompletes from the active member list. The mention notifies that person immediately. Hover any message and a Reply icon attaches it as quoted context to your next send.
Click any avatar and you get the menu you would expect from a chat product built in 2026: View profile, Send DM, Add friend, Follow, Mute, Block, Report. Reports flow into the same moderation queue mods already use for forum content. One inbox for everything.
Custom emoji and GIFs as first-class affordances.
Tenant admins upload :shortcode: images at /admin/chat/emoji — up to 256 KB each, virus-scanned, PNG/GIF/WebP/JPEG — and members type the shortcode to drop the image inline. The picker has eight icon-only tabs (Smileys, Gestures, Hearts, Animals, Food, Activities, Objects, Custom) so it fits comfortably above the composer without crowding it out.
GIFs got their own button. The bold GIF label next to the smiley opens a full-screen picker with a wide search input, trending preloaded, debounced search, click-outside to close. Pick one and it lands as a direct URL in your message; the room renders it inline.
Member cosmetics show up in chat too.
Your username color, avatar frame, chat-bubble shader, and profile-effect particles all render inside chat rooms, not only on your profile page. If you activated the Hologram bubble or Cherry Blossom effect on the cosmetics shop, that’s what members see when you post. Cosmetics that earn or buy in mobieusCredits matter more in a real-time room than they do in a slow-moving thread, because the cosmetic is the thing that telegraphs “this is me” to a room full of people scanning the stream.
For tenant admins: every knob you would expect.
Create rooms at /admin/chat-rooms as public, listed-private, or hidden. Set minimum role to read and minimum role to chat as separate values — plenty of communities want everyone to read along while only verified members can talk. Slow mode is a per-room knob in seconds. Useful for AMAs and big launches.
Mods (role 3+) can mute a member in a specific room for a fixed number of minutes or indefinitely. Active mutes surface in the admin’s KPI strip alongside open reports, watchers, and message volume in the last 24 hours. At-a-glance is the only kind of glance an admin has time for.
Need to rename a room or tighten its role gates? The Edit page on every row lets you change name, topic, visibility, both role minimums, and slow mode. Slug is locked so existing bookmarks keep working. To rename the URL, archive the room and create a new one.
Why we did not gate chat to Pro+.
We thought about it. Real-time chat is heavier than forums, and gating it would have been an easy upsell hook. We decided no. Chat is too central to community texture to put behind a paywall. If you are on Starter at $19/month, your community gets the same real-time loop a Sovereign tenant at $2,500/month gets. The current launch promotion runs Starter at $24.50/month for the first twelve months — chat is still included. Tenant admins can turn it off per-tenant from /admin/config#section-features if they want a forum-only community, but the default everywhere is enabled. The full feature matrix is on the pricing page.
How this changes your week as an operator.
Monday: a new member joins. They see the mobieusChat link in the nav, click it, land in #general-chat, say hi, and get four replies in the next two minutes. They feel welcomed in the way most community platforms cannot replicate without a separate chat app bolted on the side.
Tuesday: a hot forum thread spills out into chat. People keep posting in the thread, but the back-and-forth that would have buried it lives in chat instead. The thread stays readable.
Wednesday: you announce an AMA. You spin up a new room called #ama-2026-q2, set min-role-to-post to Verified, leave min-role-to-read at Everyone. Members watch the AMA live, verified members ask the questions, the noise floor stays low.
Friday: you check /admin/chat-rooms. Three rooms, 23 active watchers, 412 messages in the last 24 hours, zero open reports. The KPI strip is at the top because at-a-glance is the only kind of glance you have time for on a Friday.
Roadmap.
Voice rooms are on the list. Threaded replies inside chat (Slack-style sidebars) are on the list. Per-room webhooks — so an external tool can listen to #announcements — are on the list. Per-room slash commands are on the list. We are not committing dates because we ship every week and the roadmap shifts when something earns priority. The changelog is the source of truth on what actually landed when.
Try it.
If you are on a Mobieus tenant already, hit /rooms and you are in. If you are not on Mobieus yet, the free trial spins up a tenant in about two minutes with chat enabled out of the box. The mobieusChat product page has the long-form feature list.