[Gossip-dev] Improvement Ideas

[Richard Hult]

Martyn Russell skrev:
 > 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 :)

Heh, that's unfair imo. The use case is just that, that you sometimes
want to be online but not tell everyone that you are. I definitely see a
use for that and would use it myself if we had the feature (for example
if I don't want to be contacted on a friday night because I'm dead tired
but still want to talk to a friend, or just to see if he's available).

>>> 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.

This is not exactly the same thing. The main reason for not having an
away state that "sticks" when you're at the computer is because it's so
easy to forget to say you're available when you are. The invisible thing
is meant for privacy reasons, and is better for that, instead of faking
that you are not at the computer by abusing the away state for that.

/Richard

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