Olark Hummingbird theme

[matt297]

As of March/April 2017, Olark started forcefully upgrading all chat widget installations to use their new Hummingbird theme. For us, this broke our implementation using the currently outlined solution.

Discussions with their support staff suggested we try an approach similar to their jQuery mmenu fix, which essentially tells the jquery-mmenu plugin to leave the olark chatbox alone (i.e. keep it on the page) when it rewrites the DOM.

The solution we ended up using relies on Turbolinks 5's data-turbolinks-permanent implementation to copy elements between pages. In our particular case we had caching disabled, and the solution uses jQuery syntax. While it could probably be refactored to apply more broadly, I figured it was worth sharing in the meantime in case anyone had run into similar issues.

You can find our solution below:
https://gist.github.com/matt297/af62b0c80ab09df30e9d5d71b5f53d0a

UPDATE: While our solution does allow the chatbox to persist across pages (and the chatbox still allows users to send messages and interact with it as expected), those messages never actually reach the live chat operator and vice versa. Will update this issue if/when we have a full fix.