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The chat widget is a floating button that opens a conversation panel. It runs on any site, needs no framework, and is kept deliberately small.

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Set it up

1

Add the channel

In the dashboard, go to Channels and pick Chat on your website.
2

Answer four questions

Your domain, whether to ask for an email address, the opening message, and how it should behave on a phone. Any of these can be changed later.
3

Choose how it looks

A colour and a position. The preview reflects a visitor’s view as you adjust them.
4

Paste one line into your site

Under Install you will find your snippet. Put it before the closing </body> tag.
That is the whole installation. The script is async, so it will never hold up your page.

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Your domain

This is the setting people get wrong, so it pays to be precise. You provide a domain, not a page: yoursite.com, not yoursite.com/contact. A subdomain counts as a separate address. If your site lives at www.yoursite.com, enter that. If you run chat on both the marketing site and the app, list both. We check the domain on our side against the page the widget actually loaded on. That is what stops someone from copying your snippet onto their own site and using your workspace.
Changing the domain later keeps the same widget key, so the snippet already on your site keeps working. It stops answering on the old domain the moment you save.

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The public key is public

data-public-key is meant to sit in your page source. It is not a secret and it cannot read anything. It identifies which placement is asking, and the domain check is what keeps it safe. Do not confuse it with an API credential, which starts with mdsk_api_ and must never appear in a browser.

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Asking for an email address

You can have the widget ask for an email after the visitor’s first message. The ask happens in the conversation, after they have said what they want, not as a form standing in front of the chat. A visitor who has already typed their question is far more likely to leave an address than one who has been asked for one before they could ask anything. An address given this way is stored unverified. See requesters for what that means and why.

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On a phone

Two choices:
  • Full screen, the default and almost always right. A floating chat panel over a phone screen has no room to be useful.
  • Floating panel, for the rare case where your site is itself a full-screen mobile app that cannot give up the view.

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Turning it off

The Pause switch on the placement stops the key from resolving. The widget then renders nothing at all, not a broken panel, so you can pause it without touching your site’s code. Conversations that already arrived stay in your inbox.