Re: Feature request maybe?

On 8 Jan, 2005, at 19:47, Jonathan Eisch wrote:

> I think lots of these ideas can be brought together in a way that 
> would probably work pretty well, and might not be too difficult to 
> implement.
>
> If a message is received from a user for which there is no 
> corresponding conversation window currently open, a conversation 
> window is displayed (like normal).  If this message is within a 
> certain time frame from the last message to or from that user (as 
> discussed before, probably a preference), then we display the last 
> couple messages from the previous conversation above the new message, 
> somehow distinguished from normal messages (different color 
> background, maybe washed out text, maybe italics... etc.)  The user 
> will have a button somewhere along the lines of "append to previous 
> conversation".  If the user clicks that, the conversation window is 
> made to look like the window was never closed from the previous 
> conversation (all old and new messages displayed).  If the user does 
> not click the button, then the previous conversation text disappears 
> at some point and we continue as we normally would.

It shouldn't be a button, for one, since some people will always click 
it, and some people never will (I hate the 'close' button on the 
sidebar, especially since there isn't a corresponding 'open' button). 
And 'within a certain time frame' is also a little silly, since I might 
as well continue yesterday's conversation.

(That said, can we kill the 'would you like to send an offline 
message?' dialog? A simple "sending offline messages..." line is 
enough. And similarly, display messages sent to offline MSN users 
anyway (with the 'user not available' on the following line) since I'd 
like to know what I was trying to say.)

Displaying the last few things until both people have said something 
seems like a better idea, with a user-definable limit (20?), since the 
amount which is relevant varies (half my conversations end one-sided 
while I'm busy). Bothering to remove this text is silly, considering it 
won't be logged (which would be pointless), and we have infinite 
scrollback. Having a button to prepend the previous conversation is 
also silly (might as well have a 'show previous conversation' toolbar 
button, which will pop up a window which can be closed). And both of 
those require recording which bits were from the previous conversation 
(so they can be removed, or won't be displayed twice when prepending 
the previous conversation), and the second requires funky log 
manipulation for the desired functionality (which in the 'really 
infinite scrollback' problem when I want to continue the previous 
conversation more than once), since the current conversation will 
already have been written to disk.

Otherwise, continuing logs should be trivial, since we already write 
all the end tags anyway. And a feature to automatically continue logs 
(since the length of a session depends more on when fire crashes or I 
need to sleep/disconnect for some reason than anything else), 
optionally within the last day/week/month/whatever. And with that, a 
feature to automatically start a new log, say, every day/week/month. 
And ta-da, we have monthly logging implemented (hopefully with better 
filenames, since the time and weekday are completely irrelevant when my 
logs go on for weeks, and the spaces are annoying too).

This, at least, means I can close conversations more regularly without 
having a billion log files. 2000 is a lot, given that I tend not to 
close any.

- Purr



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