Chatterbox highlighting

I was thinking this morning it would be good if the chatterbox had some highlighting to indicate if someone has written or responded to you. My suggestion is this:

1. The input field goes red when someone in the chatterbox writes a message to you using [name]
2. The text that the person wrote to you goes red also.

I believe this would have quite a positive effect on communications for four reasons:

1. You'll be able to tell when there is an answer or something relating to you in the chatterbox without having skim read all the contents. At a glance you'll be able to see "Oh, this is for me!".

2. It will by default train people to use the [name] tagging if they are writing to someone, and hence making communication in the chatterbox more efficient and easy.

3. Sometimes if you reading posts or doing other things in PerlMonks besides paying attention to the chatterbox you could miss something someone writes to you because they've see you as a "User Online". The higlighting would draw your attention to the fact that someone in the chatterbox just wrote something relating to you.

4. This increased use of name tagging in the chatterbox could mean it gets used for points by tracking when someone is responding to someone else (although idle chatter by bored geeks could see them racking up endless points - so this last point lacks possible merit).

All in all though I feel the idea is credbile and I can't envisage being too hard to implement. Thoughts/comments?

Dean
The Funkster of Mirth
Programming these days takes more than a lone avenger with a compiler. - sam
RFC1149: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

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Re: Chatterbox highlighting
by castaway (Parson) on Apr 13, 2004 at 21:18 UTC

user settings

Personally, also, I would prefer people not address their answers to others directly quite so much, it reminds me too much of IRC, which the CB is not. Its a conversation for all, not a set of individual discussions happening in the same room by coincidence.

Name tagging is already being used to count 'points' (who talks to whom, and whose name gets mentioned the most), see Chatterbox conversational clusters, and http://mojotoad.perlmonk.org/cbs.

If you miss something, you're unlikely to see it in the CB itself anyway, since that only holds the last 10 lines, and if theres a lot going on, those last seconds.. If you want to see something you've missed, try asking diotalevi about his CB summoner, or using one of the history lists

(Last comment, make a patch.. ;)

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Re: Re: Chatterbox highlighting

by crabbdean (Pilgrim) on Apr 13, 2004 at 21:31 UTC

If you miss something, you're unlikely to see it in the CB itself anyway, since that only holds the last 10 lines, and if theres a lot going on, those last seconds.

Dean
The Funkster of Mirth
Programming these days takes more than a lone avenger with a compiler. - sam
RFC1149: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

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Re: Chatterbox highlighting
by kutsu (Priest) on Apr 13, 2004 at 21:21 UTC

Okay, lets go through your points as they are:

1. Since the CB only holds relatively few messages, skimming it is not considered a real waste of time.

2. he, she, they were all invented to improve the efficient and easy of English, and their equivilents in all other languages I know of. Also what about stuff like "he said" would this need highlighted, thereby possible ruining a joke or other purpose.

3. If someone truly wishes to talk to you they can /msg you. And if you are busy with a node, ie. reading it, you will proably not refresh the page in time to see the message anyway, meaning highlighting is a mote point

4. Points mean less then xp (no pic ;)

I'm not going to go deep into implimenting it, though checking to see who a person is, matching that against messages, and then implimenting some css class to highlight only for him/her sounds like a headache to me.

"Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum - I think that I think, therefore I think that I am." Ambrose Bierce

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Re: Chatterbox highlighting
by hossman (Prior) on Apr 14, 2004 at 00:37 UTC

With the exception of part#4 of your question, it basicly boils down to the same suggestion as this node, except that was regarding all links on PM, and you are only refering to the Chatterbox. All you would need to do is set up your Custom CSS to show links to your home node in red (or wahtever color you want)

And as long as I'm linking to that thread, I might as well link straight to Aristotle's Comment, which points out that browsers supporting "CSS Level 2" can do this without any changes to the HTML generated by the site.

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Javascript Chatterbox highlighting?
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Apr 14, 2004 at 10:12 UTC

javascript.chatterbox.hilight.html

javascript.chatterbox.hilight2.html

My apologies to the monks for immortalizing that bit of CB traffic :)

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"
I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).
** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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