A great idea just occurred to me. What if SO chat would be re-built so it's based on a time-tested real-time chat protocol. People could connect with their native clients. Any additional functions that the chat has and the protocol has not, could be made available by plug-ins for those clients. That would be so standards-compliant! As to which protocol to choose... hmm. Maybe IRC?
Relatedly, is it just me, or is the SO chat sound much louder than the MSO one? I haven't gotten notifications close enough together on each site to reasonably judge, but for some reason it seems that way.
Even though I elected to ignore a user everywhere, I still can read his messages from the "other rooms you're in" pane -- thus making ignoring not very useful.
so it actually works as expected. But I agree that considering all other messages are hidden, it might make sense to hide the old one in the sidebar as well...
hmm...
this somewhat ties in with the whole "what to display in the sidebar when the last message in the other room gets deleted" thing...
True. I'm actually not sure if we should show an ignored user in the list at all -- that's pretty much a relic from the days when the only way to unignore a user was by clicking their avatar in chat.