Chat improvements

I've made a bunch of improvements to the chat feature. The most visible changes are:

You can now use [user name] to deal with users with spaces in their names (or any users):
- /msg [jon doe] text
- /ignore [jon doe]
- /unignore [jon doe]
You can't send a duplicate /msg to a single user unless you wait 500 seconds or until the recipient deletes the first message
There are a lot more cases where you get told what went wrong. These include:
- Submitting duplicate text tells you that you already said that and "Don't 'reload'?".
- /ignore and /unignore notify of success and tell you whether you were previously ignoring that user. (See ignored users for the full list of people you are currently ignoring.)
- Sending a /msg to an invalid user now displays "Send failed (see Message Inbox)." just in case you have too many unarchived private /msgs such that the /msg from root informing you of the problem isn't visible.
- "/msg bob Use <code></table></code>" no longer includes an unescaped </table> in the "You said ..." notice (which messes up the rest of the nodelets for that page load).
- Trying the chat when you have /chatteroff tells you to enter "/chatteron" if you want to chat publicly.
All /commands ignore case so "/MSG TYE ME TOO!" actually works.
You can no longer send a blank private message with "/msg tye " (note trailing space).

There were also a bunch of minor changes or bug fixes or things that only affect certain administrative groups.

Note also that some things were intentionally not "fixed":

"/msh tye shhh", "\msg tye wait...", and " /msg tye now!" (note the leading space) will simply be displayed in public chatter. Previous attempts to do otherwise were very poorly received. If you want such "protection", then evaluate some of the other chatterbox clients as some of them offer such.

Previously I had made but not announced a fix that prevents an unclosed <!-- from hiding subsequent items.

Enjoy!

- tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

Comment on Chat improvements Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Chat improvements by belg4mit (Prior) on May 03, 2002 at 21:08 UTC
Cool. And while I realize I could write or customize a client to handle this case for myself, I'm interested in knowing how many people get bitten by "/msg belg4mit, what about foo?" `-- perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"`	[reply]
Re: Chat improvements by loosifer (Novice) on May 09, 2002 at 03:56 UTC
Hi Tye, Is this code available? I know that everydevel.com has nodeballs available, one of which is the ChatterBox nodeball (as emessage, I believe). Are you going to sync your new changes to their nodeball? And more generally, is there some sort of community of people sharing nodeballs? I'm interested in getting a site together running Everything, but most of the work I would do is already done by perlmonks.org. Do I have to reimplement all of that, or is available in some way? Thanks, loosifer (yep, I'm a newbie here)	[reply]
(tye)Re: Chat improvements by tye (Sage) on May 10, 2002 at 22:23 UTC
No, I am not synching any changes with any other stuff. Perl Monks was already out of sync with Everything else. There are some who hope to resync, but I'm not working on it (though I am documenting what I do in hopes that will help them). I hear E2 has a hugely revamped messaging system and key E2 developers have access to all of Perl Monks' code. So others are free to do those things. (: - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply]