[Gossip-dev] Improvement Ideas

[Martyn Russell]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 15:13 +0100, CJ van den Berg wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 10:54:37AM +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 01:51 +0100, Keywan Najafi Tonekaboni wrote:
> > > What about a "invisible"-state in gossip. Was there a discussion about
> > > it in the past. I would like to have the possibility to go invisible in
> > > jabber.
> > 
> > I can't see the point in this to be honest. Why would you want to do
> > that? 
> 
> I would imagine that there are plenty of legitimate reasons why you would
> not want someone to know that you are at your computer, or even _which_
> computer you are at. IMO privacy is a big issue in instant messaging and
> presence applications and invisibility and/or forced away status are useful
> when I don't want my computer to broadcast to the whole world where I am and
> what I'm doing.

I agree privacy is quite important in Instant Messaging and it is
important that the user should be able to control how much interruption
they receive as by configuring the software.

If you don't want people to know that your presence information you
shouldn't use an Instant Messaging client. The whole point is real time
communication of presence and messaging and if you don't want that,
perhaps you should be using email.

It just sounds like you have seen an "invisible" state somewhere else
(like MSN Messenger) and thought, I want that in Gossip, unless you can
give me a couple of use cases that I haven't considered :)

> > <rant>
> > Say you have that feature and you see a bunch of users online. Those
> > users that are offline may not actually be offline, so it falls into the
> > same category as those requests we get from users saying they want to
> > set their state to away while using their computer. It means your status
> > is not truly representative and therefore less meaningful.
> > </rant>
> 
> This is not true. The usefulness of the information stays exactly the same.
> Whether I am _actually_ offline or whether I just _say_ I am offline is
> irrelevant. The fact that I am unavailable stays the same. 

But you are not unavailable, you can still be sent messages even if you
appear offline, and your client would still receive messages (if users
send you messages for you to receive when you return online) since you
aren't really offline.

-- 
Regards,
Martyn