jdev - 2020-05-18

Is there any client which notifies you if your nickname is metioned prefixed with an @?

https://github.com/tigase/beagle-im/issues/14#issuecomment-630352808

I hope not, that's a crappy slack-ism

moparisthebest: The beagle dev suggested me to tell my clients devs to also notify on @user. Because his client adds an @ in front which results in not being notified of that mention.

Is there any XEP where mentions are defined? MUC XEP?

Wojtek: Are you the one from Beagle? Do you know any client supporting those @mentions? Afair none of all the XMPP clients I tested notifies you on them.

https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0372.html#usecase_mention ;)

Ge0rG: Is this used in the wild? I thought clients are just parsing the messages. Also this won't work in public MUCs as you don't know the JID of the mentioned person.

Martin: of course not

Ha, there's an XEP for that (that nobody uses). :D

I'm sure some clients look for any old substring of your name, instead of ones surrounded by whitespace or :,

some users with short nicknames dislike that

in gajim you can define a list of words which you get notified on

so its in theory supported, though not by default

we had an unfortunate user in our IRC channel once who chose the nickname 'z' and his client would highlight him constantly if we said zapped or yowza or anything like that

so we abused him a lot :)

Martin, yes, Converse.js does support it, sending and receiving.

Martin, I suggest you suggest the Beagle devs not to do it this way :x

How it works is that when you press @ it presents you with a list of users in the room, you pick one cycling with tab, and on sending it replaces @Martin with Martin in the body, and adds a reference.

Race condition happens when the user left in-between these two operations.

What converse does makes a bit more sense already

Sure.

Not sure if I can convince them.

You can point them to Converse, the only other XMPP client (to my knowledge) to use @nicks.

And which thankfully doesn’t put the @ on the wire.

So that it integrates properly with the ecosystem.

Link Mauve, how does that cause a race condition?

is it stupid and only processes the @-mention when the message is sent instead of when it’s composed? :(

Yes.

Was this not clear in my description, “on sending it replaces @Martin with Martin in the body, and adds a reference.”?

Also there's no buffer and if you start replying to somebody who leaves the room you can't autocomplete anymore either ✏

Same with profanity.

well with profanity (or other clients that don't do @things), you can just write the nickname

With converse it would also add the reference, that it doesn't do in this case

I've unfortunately been forced to use MS teams lately, it interprets formatting as you type, but with a bit of delay, and replaces it in-line

Ah they use what Georg linked earlier.

Converse can work with the list of room members though, which is handy and counters all the issues of people leaving

which means if you type :) and hit enter, it'll actually send text :) then put a real smiley in your text box after the message was sent

same with code blocks and everything else, it's TERRIBLE to work with

like if I want to send code `bla` I have to put a space after the last ` and wait a few seconds for it to be replaced, if I hit enter too fast, it doesn't do any formatting

seriously who would implement something this bad

Sounds terrible indeed.

MattJ, I should finish my module which automatically promotes regulars to members, and demote them once they aren’t present for a long time.

But I’ve been trying to generalise that for statistics too, so it isn’t finished yet.

Yes please

Hi Martin, yes - I'm from Tigase/Beagle. As I explained in the linked issue - we decided to go with `@` as it's states the intention of mentioning someone more explicitly (and it helps with avoiding abuse as moparisthebest mentiond with guy nicknamed `z`); there is yet another argument for that, and this is somewhat related to push notifications -- in Tigase you can currently "register" your nickname and then you would get notifications for intentional mentions in MUC (instead of including even random correlations) Current argument for not sendongi `@` over wire boils down to basically: other clients don't do it and we don't like it (mostly because of habbit and because other client don't do it) There is xep-0372 but as Ge0rG said - nobody uses it; and as yo mendioned - it may be tricky to use in MUC (though, I think that maybe using FullJID with room+nick would work)

Wojtek, no, the main argument against @ is that encoding intent in the body is a terrible idea, see the current LC on XEP-0393.

yet everyone assumes that a string should be assume as 'mention' - which is IMHO equally as bad

I am only a user so I don't know what is the best solution but having two ways of mentions is a bad UX because I wasn't notified of Beagle users mentioning me.

Martin out of curiosity - which client do you use?

Wojtek, what Link Mauve says

Wojtek, do you expect BeagleIM to make the entire ecosystem to change, or do you plan on keeping it to controlled environments where it only has to interact with itself?

Otherwise, as you can see from me hling you, most people using other clients will use the traditional way, not the Slack way.

Wojtek: Regularly I use profanity and Conversations. Sometimes also Dino and Gajim.

@Link Mauve it's not 'slack way' - afair there were prior usage (twitter comes to mind I guess, mastodon uses it the same way); A lot of IM's actually uses `@` as a way to mention… There is no XEP that mandates that mentions should come in a plaintext form - it's just an assumption, which is quite bad (because as shown it breaks when suddenly someone doesn't follow something that's not written)

Maybe Someone™ should write a XEP about the current usage.

I said Slack because AFAIK it’s the one which popularised @ mentions for IM, but yes that probably comes from Twitter.

Or from perl, dunno. :D

Link Mauve do we really want to standardise current usage though? when there is 0372? :-)

I don’t believe so, but as historical why not.

Wojtek, the point is wire format vs input format

The rest, the specific sigil etc., doesn't actually matter :)

I can see the French hate the way the @ key is unconvenient for their azerty keyboards :o)

Where is the @ on French keyboard layout?

Wojtek: use 372. Converse supports it, and I'm happily using it for sending notifications from MUCs

(Prosody)

Based on registered nicks, as it sounds like you are too

Having another compatible client would be great :)

Martin, AltGr+0.

(I have been asked why other clients don't generate the notifications, and I had to defend the sorry state of the XMPP ecosystem... let's fix that!)

MattJ, +1!

we are leaning towards 0372, but funnily enough, @Link Mauve - we do hope that "the entire ecosystem to change" by adopting it as well ;-)

Me too. :)

But this is an actual improvement, while using @ like you’re doing is just preventing my client from hl’ing me, and doesn’t have any benefit other than familiarity for Slack users.