Hi @MarcGravell, I've been thinking 'chat' on and off all weekend :) I think that starring is going to become very important for high-volume rooms, but maybe it needs another icon. Starring is too much like voting.
Maybe 'pin'? or 'landmark'?
And it could/should also be used for marking not just individual posts, but (for example) the beginning of an interesting/important discussion
Yeah, I pondered for a while whether to ask that as a question on meta, simply because in a few minutes, my comment will have scrolled off screen and be 'lost'
@MarcGravell, Another thing I've thought about is private/direct messaging. People are going to carry on asking for it, I fear. The main reason invoked is being able to send other people 'private' contact details. I think that if you satisfy that need, it might remove some of the strength of the demand. Idea: people could enter their contact details once in their profile, then you'd have a special syntax/button for making them visible to a specific user.
@Benjol Also, you might consider having a user being able to request another's contact detail by a button their profile. You'd only have that button if you wanted to be able to share contact details.
But, say - for example - you were coming on holiday in my neck of the woods and wanted to chat about places to visit, or drinking a beer together, what do we do?
Create a separate room - which is preserved forever?
@shog9 For example, wlog, I want to give benjol my email address, but I don't want to let you know it. It would not work for me to post it on the site :-p
@Benjol: this is where you really find out how well you know the people you think you "know"
I'd have to say, if neither one of you wants to post your email address in anything resembling a public place, then a PM system in chat isn't going to help
email addresses are easy to come by
granted, it's not hard to set up a new account on Meta, scrape together 20 points, and show up here...
but it's still harder than getting a throw-away email address
@Shog9, yeah well, knowing here on the interwebs definitely does require the quotes... but read what I said. I wasn't asking for a PM system, just for a way to easily take the discussion elsewhere. And the aim is also to remove the pressure for a PM system
And a non-negligable positive side-effect might be to remove a bit of cruft from discussions here too. I dunno, just thinking out loud
so essentially your idea is, i'd have a private area on my bio page where I could put contact info. Then, I'd click a little "share with *user*" button, enter your ID, and you'd get access to this area for some indeterminate amount of time.
so i'd use this by posting in an open chat somewhere, "Hey, Benjol, go check my bio page - there you'll find my email address, with which you can send me an email, at which point we'll be able to continue our planning in private"
@Shog9, more-or-less, yes. It's mildly clunky. Though to be honest I was thinking more Skype or some-other-chat mechanism rather than email address. But 'I clicked on a button and you should be able to see my contact details in my profile now'.
@Shog9, there is a new link at the top of the page (which I just noticed) - "load to my last message". which could be helpful, except on a high volume room (like this one), when I've been away for several days...
I've created a plug-in that duck-punches the jQuery Ajax function. One problem that I cannot locate when running the Ajax unit tests for 1.4.2 It will not pass the two tests
Ajax events with context
jQuery.ajax context modification
Test one has a test that always fails:
function callback(ms...
Quick slightly offtopic question: are there any free Flash compilers? I've never written in ActionScript, but I kinda want to, but I'm not planning to pay to learn a language I'll probably never use.
Yeah. I've just never been bothered about the bonus rep, tbh. But I love the new bounty system, I just offered 500 rep on another guy's question that I couldn't answer for him. His question had gone unanswered, but it has 3 answers now.
i do agree with the OP lately, I'm seeing more questions by people who don't know what they're doing, leaning on a library too much, I just think if Prototype was the most popular...the same people would be asking the same questions, just using Protoype instead
haha yeah, if it wouldn't be immediately flagged I'd make a random wiki of who's your favorite polka singer to prove that point
I knew you would ask that... have tidied a few things around replies; they now appear in the event-stream, for example - so you'll start bouncing if someone explicitly replies to you. You also get things like scrolling/highlight for replies (if the original message is available in the client)
Golfing is easy. How large can you make it?
Enterprise FizzBuzz is written in C# and weighs in at 12 classes and 3 interfaces (not including the main program driver). It comes with a suite of unit tests written in MbUnit. It's fairly loosely coupled but I really should update it for C# 3.5.
I really should implement the button Jeff added. He's taking the novel approach "add non-functioning buttons to the UI; hope the dev team notices and writes some code for that"
so don't be expecting "load to my last message" to do much at the moment
Why such dull colours? Oh I forgot, it's created by programmers :-P
I'm not by any means a designer, but from my art background I can tell you that changing the orange top-bar of stackoverflow, you've caused a collapse of the design regarding the rest of the colours. The design needs the orange ...
Heh.. I'm just an old psychedelic music fan, you see... I like colour! :) (See the santana album cover artwork on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_music for example!)
@Andy - yes, if only there was some visual metaphor we could use to add context to something, perhaps even making it easy to find the original discussion.
@MarcGravell, another css glitch, more subtle, but if you mouseover my explicit answer to your explicit answer, the arrow on yours is invisible again...
One of the rules for @ notifications is that it must be followed by at least 3 letters and have no spaces. Removing the spaces makes it work for people who have names like "J. Doe" (@J.Doe)
Woah, cool feature that "reply/highlight reply" feature.
SUGGESTION: The arrow-symbol on the reply looks counter-intuitive to me.
The little arrow symbol is analogous to the giant arrow you would draw from the original post down to the reply, if we had infinite real estate. Correct?
But the arrow you use (↰) is pointing up and away from the bottom. Arrows pointing to the replies should come down from above (↳).
eh... @Robert, I was actually trying to imply that, ideally, the display would be threaded. I have no real preference on arrow direction, other than that the arrow you suggest might make it appear that the post was a response to the message directly above it.
Is there any plans to make this chat engine useful for teams outside of stackexchange? @Jeff seems to think it is very useful for distributed team collaboration. It would be really nice if other teams could use this statefull-web-chat system for their intra-team communication.
I've created a plug-in that duck-punches the jQuery Ajax function. One problem that I cannot locate when running the Ajax unit tests for 1.4.2 It will not pass the two tests
Ajax events with context
jQuery.ajax context modification
Test one has a test that always fails:
function callback(ms...
Golfing is easy. How large can you make it?
Enterprise FizzBuzz is written in C# and weighs in at 12 classes and 3 interfaces (not including the main program driver). It comes with a suite of unit tests written in MbUnit. It's fairly loosely coupled but I really should update it for C# 3.5. 
