[Telepathy] [Usability] Empathy is planning to make chats persistent - requires design changes

[Chandni Verma]

Hi Allan,

Thanks for looking into the issue.

On 8 April 2011 18:43, Allan Day <allanpday at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey Chandni,
>
> Chandni Verma wrote:
> > The Usability Team,
> >
> > Empathy is planning to make chats persistent so that closing a chat
> > window does not affect the connectivity of the user to the chat-room.
> > In order to accomplish this, we need to make some non-trivial design
> > decisions which require your creative input before embarking upon on
> > it.
> >
> > Bug link: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=599184
> >
> > Related bugs having ready branches:
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643295
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643755
> >
> > Related bug closed as redundant:
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601162
>
> A key question here is how rooms get added to the contact list. Getting
> the user to manually add them isn't a great solution, since it's labour
> intensive and potentially lacks discoverability.


I had in mind that whenever a user connects to a chatroom and marks it as
"Persistent", the chatroom will be added, in a "Rooms" special group holding
MUC rooms in the contacts roster and the room will be removed from the group
as soon as the channel is explicitly closed (chat is left/parted or the full
chat window is closed not just a tab[?]) except when the room is marked as
favorite in which case it will stay in the "Rooms" group even when
disconnected.

So basically there are two binary variables for deciding when rooms get
shown in the contact list:

*Favorite*                 *Persistent*               *Shown in "Rooms"
group*
    0                              0                                      0
    0                              1                                      1
    1                              0                                      1
(just for clubbing all favorite rooms together and maybe we can remove the
main window "Room"

menu altogether)
    1                              1                                      1


So now if the user wants to make chats persistent (keeping in mind there may
be some who don't want to use this functionality) he just needs to mark it
as "Persistent" and the room will stay connected and displayed on the
contact list until explicitly left. If he wants the chatroom to stay in the
contact list even after explicitly leaving the room, he additionally needs
to mark it as "Favorite". These should be *easy* one click CheckMenuItem in
the respective chat windows and even on the menu popped up when
right-clicking the room in contact roster so this should be *discoverable*also.



> On the other hand,
> adding all rooms to the list risks swamping it with chat rooms, so that
> it is hard to see actual contacts.
>
> Is this something that has been thought about?
>

This shouldn't be a problem when we have a separate "Rooms" group which will
be storing all currently connected and favorite rooms.


>
> The general aim of this feature seems to be to minimise the scalability
> limitations of tabs, as encountered by heavy muc users. If that is the
> case, there might be other (potentially more radical) approaches that
> could solve the problem more effectively. A conversation view might be
> one such possibility.
>

I think, the inability to close chatroom windows is a weakness of Empathy
specially when users are used to having other applications like Pidgin
allowing them to close the windows without leaving the rooms. I expect this
feature to be optional though!
If there are scalability limitations for tabs, then that's a bug which needs
to be addressed irrespective of whether this feature gets implemented or
not!

PS: Other Empathy developers' views on this are very much requested.


>
> Best wishes,
>
> Allan
> --
> Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
> IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org
>
>
Kind regards,
Chandni
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