XSF Discussion - 2024-06-08

singpolyma, about the "on-mention"/"on-reply" notification setting… why would you want to be notified on replies to yout messages, but not on mentions of yout nick? Is it because you don't want to be disturbed when someones spells your nickname with no intent on "invoking you in the room"? ✏

singpolyma, about the "on-mention"/"on-reply" notification setting… why would you want to be notified on replies to yout messages, but not on mentions of your nick? Is it because you don't want to be disturbed when someones spells your nickname with no intent on "invoking you in the room"? ✏

how would he know what another user intends

pep., I think you had a "mentions" XEP drafted somewhere, do I remember this right?

> how would he know what another user intends with what a lot of IM clients use: @nickname-style mentions ↺

which is a bit more advanced than just prepending an @, but actually conveying the intention of "pinging" someone

personally i think this distinction is not of great use

It also allows clients to customize how they display the @mention, for instance in whatsapp, there's no notion of nickname but you always see the name you use in your address book for a given phone number.

nicoco: the two options I support are mentions but not replies, and mentions + replies

the question was why

Because being notified on replies has never been the behaviour before and many times someone replies there is no reason to ping you, so that remains the default. Usually if someone wants to ping you in reply they'll mention you as well. But some users want to see all replies to their messages so it's an option

OK thanks, I had it the wrong way around then, funny because I did not even think this could be desirable behaviour.

hm seems we have different experiences, if someone replies to my message, its mostly to answer me

I think the subtle distinction here is "being quoted" vs "being replied to"

i dont think so, the client has no real possibility to discover if you quoted him

so i dont think this even factors into this

In practise users often use reply for quote, though I do support both

Also in Cheogram replies and quotes are a single thing, because of the way it's implemented, so that makes sense. ✏

Not really, they're totally seperate things you make and send in different ways

They look similar of course, since usually with a reply you show a quote

Fair. I meant they're displayed the same.

Anyway, I'm asking that because I'm updating the "notification sync" proposed XEP, I think I'd rather keep the 3 basic options "always", "never" and "on-mention" and let room for custom extensions à la PEP bookmarks.

> personally i think this distinction is not of great use I think there is value to it, I might want to say mention the name of someone without bothering them immediately. Also, a mention XEP could cover stuff like conveying the intent to ping @everybody, @moderators, or even @specific-hat. ↺

And finally another nice thing clients can implement with an "explicit mention" mechanism is showing the profile/opening a direct chat with someone by clicking/hovering/ on a mention of someone (not necessarily ourselves). Of course clients *could* parse all participant nicknames in all message and do the same thin. I think it's a worse option than a proper dedicated mechanism, especially in large groups where the probabily of accidentally spelling out the nick of someone grows higher. Maybe everybody should carefully choose their nick to be long enough for it not to happen, but two-letters first names do exist, for instance.

This isn't Facebook, you don't have to use your real name :)

Indeed, but I like the idea that one could chose a one letter nick in a group and not be pinged constantly. I wouldn't do it, but I don't want to provide a crappy user experience to anyone who might want that either. :)

You pick a 1 letter nick that's on you, you'll change it after getting pinged enough, this also isn't Xbox where you can only change your nick a couple times per year

Honestly I think a lot of my users want different notifications per device too so I'm lukewarm on sync. But I think the kinds of possible notification options are a lot more complex than an enum i dunno

I do want different ones per device, I have busy MUCs muted on my phone often

nicoco: also mentions that aren't in the <body> are easily abusable and terrible in practice, cheogram mitigates this by only letting moderators do it, but I still hate it

You mean notifications for things not in the body? We don't have mentions yet

Imagine how fun it would be for a muc spammer to join and participate "normally" except all of his messages highlights everyone except for mods And it's not visible to mods And people with clients like Cheogram have no idea how/why they are being highlighted

> You mean notifications for things not in the body? We don't have mentions yet Yes ↺

Mentions in current xeps more or less require to be in body, which seems logical to me

The fact that I haven't come up with a good visual indicator for announcements is maybe related, but different I think

Cheogram has that thing where you @here a whole room and it's not in the body and even that is very confusing

That's not a mention. And I do intend to make a visual indicator I just haven't thought of what yed

"hmm it says singpolyma mentioned me but I've scrolled all the way back and don't see where"

If it was like gajim I would highlight the row

Probably an icon or something

Or maybe I can bold the status line

Abuse potential certainly is something to take into account, but IMHO we shouldn't underestimate the added value of mentions _even in private groups where abuse potential is nil_, where we're supposedly more widespread than public ones, at least that's what we reply to people saying XMPP is dead usually :P

That "address book integration" à la whatsapp sounds totally useless to most of us here I think. I know my mother value this feature.

She's never used IRC, nicknames in group chats are not something that make sense to her and I don't think she should learn about it tbh. We can criticize these proprietary networks all we want, and sure, their success definitely relies on a lot of other things than features and good UX of their apps (for which they have an army of devs/designers/testers/resources, yes), it would be a mistake to not think they've got *some* stuff right.

I've looked an implementing mentions a few times and I'm sure I will eventually, it's just so far been a solution searching for a problem so I end up working on other stuff. Definitely a menu for it will happen even if I don't do the protocol because people like auto complete

If I may, just showing a popup with nicknames after typing @ is all that's expected, even if that's not the "canonical IRC or XMPP way", virtually everything implements pinging someone else this way. https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0372.html#usecase_mention is a good basis I think, except that a bare JID does not work in semianon MUCs and that some form of @mods or @specific-hats would be a plus.

Yes of course, as I said I will implement that UI that's not related to any xep it's just a good ui ✏

> If I may, just showing a popup with nicknames after typing @ is all that's expected, even if that's not the "canonical IRC or XMPP way", virtually everything implements pinging someone else this way. https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0372.html#usecase_mention is a good basis I think, except that a bare JID does not work in semianon MUCs and that some form of @mods or @specific-hats would be a plus. That's what I planed to add to monocles chat actually since some people are intuitively trying to use it. ↺

Also replies with nicknames inside are often requested so everyone knows who was writing it. I think as an option it should also come

yeah those quotes without reference are a pain, one has to go on a quest to find the context each time

At this point that's just a UI choice

If people like attributions they're easy to add. I probably will soon partly because I want to hide the quote in some cases but still mark it as a reply

Though I've definitely never "gone on a quest" I just read the quote haha

But everyone has different tastes

but sometimes it's from a convo the context of which you don't know

Sometimes, someone asks a question, someone answers it, then the day after, yet another person asks the same question and I would like a nice way to reference the first answer without it being a reply to the one who answered, but to the one who asks

well ok one could argue thats covered by threads

> If it was like gajim I would highlight the row Any way is fine, it's not a big deal while only mods can do it, it becomes a big problem if anyone can do silent mentions though ↺

I'm not actually sure where that kind of thing fits, it's not *technically* a security problem but almost is

For sure I doubt I'd honour silent mentions anyway

Zash: so like a message forward

singpolyma, sure