Chat servers are a violation of pair.com's terms of service. By only having a single channel, thus intentionally limiting the maximum load of chatter, we are dodging the stated motivation of this policy and appear to have avoided upsetting pair.com so far.

If you want multiple channels of CB, you really need to implement the extra channels outside of pair.com's hosting (unless you can get an official waiver).

Let's not do this. There is always /chatteroff for the annoyed, and SoPW for the needy.

Fortunately, it seems from tye's remark that it is not really feasible anyway.

As far as I am concerned, this is an idea that needs as much backpropagating as it can get. ;)

Yeah, I think you're right... CB is for 'Chatter' .. I know a lot of serious Perl discussion ends up there, but if you're not getting an answer then that's the whole point of SoPW.

Quotes from the OP:

Some weeks ago I 'overheard' (overlooked?) a conversation in the CB about splitting it into multiple channels.

My initial reaction was negative - I like the CB as it is

Note: I'm not saying this should be done, just suggesting a possible approach if it is done.

Update:This post relates to the original wording of the response. I haven't struck it out because other monks may misunderstand my OP, so this is useful to highlight the point.

g0n, backpropagated monk

Hey g0n, my fellow monk, nothing personal :) Just my opinion on the matter...

People should be able to select some set of channels to listen to and be able to direct messages to. The interface might work like this:

/channels
  Active channels:
   General
   Eels
   YAPC Germany
   Badgers vs. Rodents
/mychannels
  You are monitoring:
   0 - General
   1 - YAPC Germany
>1 Würden Sie mich unterrichten, Deutsches zu sprechen?
  <[you]@YAPC Germany> Würden Sie mich unterrichten, Deutsches zu spre
+chen?
>-0
  You are no longer monitoring General
>="My Channel" Hey, I just started this channel.
  Added "My Channel" to list as #0.
  <[you]@My Channel> Hey, I just started this channel.
>+"Eels"
  Added "Eels" to list as #2.
/mychannels
  You are monitoring:
   0 - My Channel
   1 - YAPC Germany
   2 - Eels
/channels
  Active channels:
   General
   Eels
   YAPC Germany
   Badgers vs. Rodents
   My Channel
[download]

As do some others, I have mixed feelings about the underlying utility and even about the notion of multiple channels -- but there do seem to be points both pro and con.

Nonetheless, FWIW (if anything): it would be possible to create a version of one or another of the many Other CB Clients with a multi-channel inerface.

I can imagine, for example, a variant of Fullpage chat with multiple pairs of talk/read boxes, which might answer the "balkanization" concern to some degree

I quite like the sound of your proposed solution, though I'm not sure how it would look in practice, multiple sections in the CB nodelet? How would it fit on Fullpage chat ? How would the XML look, multiple tickers? etc. pp.

But, it appears tye has seen a large flaw in the idea, so it seems that if anything happens at all, it will have to be an external solution. The problem there (IMO), is getting users to use it.. Attempting to add an interface to IRC (or some such) transparently via a nodelet would create just as much traffic as if a chat server were running on the site itself, if not more, so that is out.

To those who say "It's just for chatting, go post an SoPW", I say: A lot of the questions that pop up in the CB are not perl related, or even programming related sometimes.. do you really want to see these as SoPWs? People recognise that there are many fine minds within reach, that may know an answer to a particular niggly question, and will share therir knowledge willingly.

In conclusion, I don't really know how to solve this dilemma, since it seems all solutions so far have some sort of snag. :( Maybe someone should get the oft-proposed MUD version of PM off the ground... (Don't look at me, please, I'm booked up until after the summer or so.. :)

Update:
I also forgot to refute: Suggesting that people "just use /ignore" doesn't solve any problems, since *me* not seeing the chatters doesnt mean they don't see each other, and thus my (or whomever others) questions still get drowned out. Apart from that, all /ignore does is make for very odd-looking conversations..

C.

How about, for an interim/compromise solution, a degree of filtering? /ignore "monk" is too granular if you want to ignore a whole conversation, & /chatteroff isn't granular enough.

You could filter by creating a drop down in the nodelet, containing threads . & A-F. Then when the code displays entries in the CB, it could do  if ($_=~/^$cgi->param('cbfilter')){print $_}. In the form, you could prepend each utterance with the character currently set as the filter, then people could change their filter settings to filter themselves out. "." of course would be intended to match all of them (not sure if that regex would interpret the . as any character without trying it, but you get my drift).

That way the filter would persist in the form, but reset (to ".") each time you come to the monastery.

g0n, backpropagated monk

It's pretty obvious that I'm a little bit out of the mainstream when I say that I really don't like the CB too much. IMO, browsers are a poor (but possible) place for interactive proceses like the CB.

Wouldn't chat functions be best served by IRC in the first place? I never figured out why PM wouldn't just echo IRC onto the nodelet instead of vice-versa... There are so many previously invented-and-refined wheels for dealing with chat already...

At the risk of contributing nothing useful, I'd just like to heartily agree with the parent post. IRC is a far superiour interface for this sort of thing. The only problem I see with actually echoing an irc channel in to the chatter box is that, due to it's far superiour interface, conversations are far faster on irc, so if you only refreshed once every minute you might miss 50% of the conversation! Of course this should be read as more of a desire for everyone to just join irc in the first place and not have any of these problems.

I beleive the reason givin when I asked the same question had to do with names. On IRC you can take any name you want and therefor impersonate people. Yes there are ways around it, I think the consus was that it was more trouble than gain. There are IRC channels for perlmonks though, at least i know devels used to use an IRC room.


___________
Eric Hodges

Depends on how one classifies the chatterbox I suppose. As it is now it's more of a social tool where people occasionally do pop in a serious question, which may or may not get answered straight away. Most of the questions tend to end up in SoPW, which is a far better place imo anyway.

As for actually using IRC, as can clearly be seen in my posting history I'm a great fan of this medium and spend a lot of time combining it with Perl and as such I'd positively love to have a place on IRC to hang out with other Monasterians, but whether it'd turn out to be a good place to ask questions is another matter. The only real reasons I can think of for someone to ask a question in CB as opposed to SoPW is because a) a fellow monk that person knows is already chatting there and is aware of the situation/known to be very knowledgeable on the matter, or b) the person asking the question is horribly impatient.
Situation b) is a serious case of "tough luck", either someone knows or noone does. As for situation a) I still think It'd be better to create a post on SoPW and then pm said expert/friend asking him/her to take a quick look at the node created, if only for the fact that that way the information might be preserved, allowing others to find the same answer later on.

Remember rule one...

I think the "better chat" interface has already been done, over in #perl on freenode. Want to step outside the normal chat for a private conversation? Its all available.

What we are missing is an easy interface between CB and irc. Perhaps a simple link to an http implementation of irc? Of course, [http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net/|the solution has already been provided in perl.

Is anyone willing to host the cgi? I'm not sure if perlmonk.org is an option or not. Of course traditional users of irc can use whatever interface they prefer.

Oh please no. /msgs scale poorly in comparison to chatter when it comes to the load on people being asked questions. If you ask something in chatter, everyone watching has an opportunity to answer while when you /msg, only that one person can respond. This is an "Eat flaming death!" sort of idea for me. Some people already have too much of this happen and it is a problem that should not be encouraged.

And we've done group /msg boxes and they suck quite a bit.

injunjoel, we already have a system for persistent public conversations and it is nodes and replies. I see extremely little advantage to some system like "/msg" but persistent and shared compared to just posting nodes. And I see lots of advantages to the existing node system over shared /msgs.

- tye