Instant Messaging

0bvious · April 2006

I love the whisper feature in Vanilla, but often when a few folks are online at once I want to send a message, and not rely on chat room plugins. Whispered messages are too slow for this kind of thing, and easy to miss.

How easy / difficult would an instant message extension be to build? Possibly one that could be used for personal messages or to announce something to the whole board.

Cheers

ADM · April 2006

You can use this:
http://lussumo.com/addons/?PostBackAction=AddOn&AddOnID=13

Personally I think it'd be better to have the option to whisper to multiple people.

ccmehil · April 2006

Or this one

http://lussumo.com/addons/?PostBackAction=AddOn&AddOnID=12

Mark · April 2006

The real issue with whispering to multiple people is the complexity of the queries involved. I honestly haven't thought about it in a long time. When I originally came up with the concept of whispers, I wanted to do it to multiple people and I quickly found that MySQL just couldn't easily do what I wanted. Not because whispering to people is complex, but because the discussion list query got WAY too complex and insanely slow. It would have to look different for every person depending on numerous variables. There were too many joins, and even with good indexing it still slowed down to an unacceptable speed.

I may try to revamp the whisper system for Version 2 and allow multiples, but it will require a restructuring of how whispers are achieved, and a good day or two of theorizing.

ithcy · April 2006

version 2? so when's that coming out?

(i'll show myself to the door)

Mark · April 2006

hahaha

*puts on word-eatin' bib*

If I was able to do Lussumo apps full time, it would be less than a year.

jsanders · April 2006

i, too, long for utopia!

ADM · April 2006

Mark: Couldn't you limit the whisper to 3 or so people? Would that help things out or still cause probs?

Mark · April 2006

As soon as you get more than one person whispering to one other, it becomes complicated.

0bvious · April 2006

The chatroom integrations are nice, but not what I am looking for. I want to be able to see someone online and send them a message straight away. In order to use the chatroom we'd both have to be in it, yet another complication in simple 'see someone' --> 'say hello' communication.

Bergamot · April 2006

Well unless the page is constantly polling the server for new messages, you'd be pretty limited as far as real-time messages popping up.

Much better to extend the Who's Online extension to keep track of real IM clients, and make links to those.

corn13read · April 2006

why don't you just make the command to use comma seperated whispers and make it process them one at a time. Is that possible? to whisper to one then to do the same command to the second user and so on and so forth? I don't know just a thought...

Mark · April 2006

No, that won't work. The issue isn't the whispers themselves, it's the per-user view of the discussion list. A user with whispers in a discussion will see a different comment count than a user without whispers or with fewer whispers or more whispers. When you start to have whispers from a single to multiples, it gets more complicated. I'm done explaining this. Rest assured, I've thought it through. There are ways to do it, but not in this version.

0bvious · April 2006

How about just not bothering updating the comment count? I could live with whispers not being counted

Mark · April 2006

ADM · April 2006

lol

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