@MarcGravell, would it be possible for you to show the local time of people on their hover-info or elsewhere? That's one thing I always looked at on IRC, what is your time. If it is just before midnight, your place, I might decide to not wait until after I've made dinner to say something to you, etc.
Maybe this is a duplicate of another question, it's certainly something which I've seen discussed in a few chat rooms, but I thought it would be interesting/useful to have reactions in one place.
How do you see yourself using chat, longterm? (once you've finished messing around with dancing gifs...
no, that would be cool to, but I want to break out portions of a room into a new sub-room
so rooms within rooms.
...like a dream within a dream...
but on a per-user-basis. so a conversation that takes place in a room can be broken out in a sub room for just one user. but let that user be able so share his/her sub-room so others can join it if they want...
a "bubble" within a room if you want... it is still part of this room so everyone else in the room can still follow it but I can filter out the rest of the room and pay attention only to the conversation within the bubble/room-in-room...
...but with less gunfire and explosions than in Inception...
...and no "limbo" mode. I want to be able to exit without getting stuck in limbo for 60 years...
@MarcGravell ok, then what I said above probably makes no sense... :)
ok. another movie-inspired idea then: The Matrix. There are plenty of SO users, so if we sedate all of them, put them in special life-support tanks then we can probably extract enough energy to power a whole lot of computers. What do you think?
No? Hmm... ok... next one: The Godfather. We can put the head of a horse in Joel's bed as a message from the SO mafia. Not sure what that would convey but still...
...or Barney: dress up Jeff Atwood in a purple dinosaur costume and have him sing and dance around to entertain the SO community...
Alien: Give Sigourney Weaver (played by Sarah Palin) a 100k start-rep on SO and make her a moderator.
That's good to know. I have been specifically clicking on the names that pop-up. It can be a bit of a pain switching from keyboard to mouse and back again for that.
@lasse that's how they appeared -- there is a rare race condition when you have a bad connection that can cause them to appear in the wrong order on your client. F5 to show the order as we see it.
Should "replies" quote the original message in the "bubble". Maybe in a smaller font. Each message is usually only 1 or 2 lines so shouldn't take much screen real estate.
For instance, if marc says, first, "Yeah, I love a beer myself", and you start replying with "Yes, I do too <at>marc, perhaps we should get together sometime?", and before you hit enter, he says "Although, I do love cuddling too"
more typically, I think you need to learn that if you're asking a question, you need to stop talking so people can listen and respond -- and if you need to add more do so by editing like I did here .. a simple press of the up arrow is all it takes!
@marc implicit replies is really what I was shooting for here. explicit replies seem so unwieldy as to be useless.
and yes, we might put a ceiling on the "is this a reply if it's twelve days later" sort of thing.
I wonder if there isn't a risk with these explicit replies that you don't bother to @ anymore, which forces everyone to mouseover to work out who you're replying to...
You know, I think Jeff does have a point here. The more we go down this "reply" road, the more this becomes like a "forum" application rather than a "chat" application.
But the problem with that is that the rollover goes the wrong way -> I can rollover the answers to find the question, but you want to rollover the question to find the answers?
@JeffAtwood - I see what you're saying. Ask a question, shut up and watch for replies, but what happens when someone else asks YOU a question in the middle of your "silence" (as I just did there) ?
right, there are ways this convention which would be (and is) very useful on twitter breaks down a bit here -- because this is real live chat, much more active than twitter even
Sub rooms sounds like a good idea. I know Jeff is against the idea of "private" chat, but how about a "private" chat wherein the participants are "private" (i.e. not anyone can join in) but the actual chat itself is publically viewable?
The reply arrow doesn't make sense if people can't straight away see which message is being replied to. You're not going to open up the chat log for just that. It's painful.
@Jeff, yeah, that way you can see directly that the person was (probably) not answering the most recent post. @Marc, well you could still do the mouseover?
this hashtag stuff is interesting, it could just work with full text mostly. I guess we'd have to show some running tally of hashtags in the sidebar and how popular they are.
feature request: make the escape key stop the bouncing gravatar. Sometimes I don't have anything interesting to say in reply, but I'm a keyboard user so clicking it is a bit of a pain.
That or when you hover the message, on the right you could get a reply (or star for that matter) button...just like comment voting/flagging works on SO
Per @Maxim Z's request, I am making my suggestion from the Gravatar bugs and improvements in chat into a full-blown feature request:
I'm not quite sure why, but I think the chat controls would feel more natural on the right, rather than the left.
My idea, as seen below, would be to move the ar...
@Wim - We're agreed. It is too painful to go clicking around looking for the original message in a transcript. If the original message is part of the same message "bubble" as the reply (perhaps in a smaller font) it's the easiest to read and get the context.
You could include the original text in the reply message bubble but have it collapsed, with a \/ (downarrow) to expand the bubble to show the original text!
here's my issue with it being below...you have to hover it then move down to actually star or reply to it, that means more delay/more chance the message scrolls up and your hover's gone doesn't it?
@Nick: what about if you wanted to hover over the message below and you're moving your mouse downwards across the messages above? If the overlay ends up covering the message you wanted to hover, that could be a bit of a pain.
right, but consider a multi-line dialog as well, the hover div would cover even the next message from the same user, would seem very unnatural as well imo
or multi-line monologue rather, not sure how you guys refer to them
Per @Maxim Z's request, I am making my suggestion from the Gravatar bugs and improvements in chat into a full-blown feature request:
I'm not quite sure why, but I think the chat controls would feel more natural on the right, rather than the left.
My idea, as seen below, would be to move the ar...
