Feature request: a friend has sent message colored dot

[josjoha]

Hello. In recent days someone on my friends list mistakenly thought that I was purposefully ignoring him, both in private message chat, and perhaps also by not answering challenges because it seemed that I was online from the OGS interface.

While there do seem to be methods by which you can know you have messages from people, such as that the chat window with that person appears, there may be room for an additional feature here ? On a PC, a chat window from a private message seems to appear (or sometimes appear), on top of the game chat bar. Even if not, if you get a chat from someone during a game, you could end up clicking it away quickly and later forgetting about it ? It is quite easy to overlook the notification bell ?

Since the interface has a small list of your friends in the ‘profile’ screen under ‘Chat with friends’, and the same list can be seen when you click the ‘friends’ button on the top menu bar, and here is already a green dot if they are online, it might be helpful to have a second dot or other symbol to their name, if they have send a message which is unread ?

Related to this, perhaps OGS shows someone being constantly online even if it is an inactive browser window somewhere on a computer with nobody behind if at that time (cannot answer any game challenges or chat), than perhaps after N time of inactivity the online indicator could change itself to a different color ?

I asked my friend if I should ask for a feature like this, and he said “Yeah, you definitely should” “I didn’t see indeed”.

Going on in this vein, perhaps it would also be interesting to have a potential friend added to the friends list, with an approve/disapprove button to it. At the moment this is handled through the notification bell, which is easy to overlook, especially when you are new ? Perhaps you feel these changes would hurt the design of the interface, as being well polished and relaxing. If so, then don’t do it I guess.

best regards.

[Jhyn]

Adding a symbol next to a friend’s name when there is an unread message, and making the friend visible even when (s)he is offline in that case, seems like a good idea.

On a related note, I don’t know if OGS keeps recent message history (click on a friend → message could show the last messages exchanged). Maybe this would take too many ressources.

[benjito]

Personally, I dont see how helpful a dot would be since already, a

@josjoha

chat window with that person appears

I do think the chat system could really use some rework though. A good system should:

• Be better at determining what is actually read vs unread (require some “action” besides opening the page to mark a message as “read”)
• Have (optional) read receipts
• Allow you to view your recent chats

[Groin]

Basically it should have a recall system. If you close and didn’t watch carefully who wrote to you, it’s just lost.
Even if it has to be kept minimalistic, this is the most annoying feature imho.

[dangermousse]

There is definitely a need for better message management on OGS and people have asked, or complained, about this many times.

Your second request is one I’ve wondered about too. I often log on in the afternoon or evening with no intention of spending all or even most of the time playing games. Often I will just log in and go off and do other things and check back in every so often. I might listen to a podcast. I might start watching a game and then watch a movie and come back to see how the game finished. I might click on a link that someone posted in chat or the forums and get lost in a rabbit-hole for three hours. I’m not the only one who does this. So, even though I’m logged in I might not actually be available for chatting or a game just at that moment that someone notices I’m logged in. So some kind of logged-in-but-inactive signal might be useful.