Welcome back to Episode ?? of me complaining and listing cool stuff, now about ~Chatrooms~
The chatrooms look like they haven't been updated in a long heccin time, so here are my complaints:
1. Chatroom names (in general)
2. Events?? (can someone explain that please?)
3. Chats are all smashed together and a bit hard to read
4. Name colors
5. /help and /rules commands disappear once chatroom fills up and is eventually forgotten
6. List of users in a room is temporary
7. Can't use the > or < for some reason
8. Can't use BBcodes
9. Can't use images (via figure tags)
10. Admins (I'll explain)
11. There's no bots!! .0.
12. Commands
13. Chatrooms for groups
14. Foreign language rooms
15. Buttons
16. Reloading the page makes it say, "[User] is gone. [User] is here." simultaneously.
17. And of course, chatrooms are unattractive. Y'all know I'll be complaining about how unattractive the site is (no offense, Hull)
So! Here are my solutions! 1. We have several chatrooms, and they all have names and are categorized into their sections (then you have mysterious chatroom ninja). I get that Hull was likely trying to stick with gaming, but can't the names be different? Preferably the roleplaying chatrooms and the general ones. The roleplaying ones are named after the little characters around the site, but not everyone knows that. I think instead of that, they should be named something more fun or simple; maybe named after colors or maybe someone could think of clever names for those rooms. Same goes for the general ones. And are those random Game and Event chatrooms necessary?
2. At the very bottom of the chatrooms menu, we have an empty tab called Events. I don't know what that is, but I'm guessing that Paint has events on occasion and people do stuff in chatrooms, idk. If that is the case, then maybe that tab itself should be moved up? Somewhere that people would actually see the event because no one will be scrolling to the bottom of that menu. (But can someone correct me if I'm wrong, and explain Events?)
3. Everyone chats, and when they do, the chats are literally all smooshed together with no line spacing whatsoever. To fix this, we should have chat bubbles! Of course, accommodate them to light and dark mode (dark gray bubbles for dark mode, light gray bubbles for light mode). And if someone has more than one chat at once, then make their bubble bigger. The user's chats should be on the right, and the other chatroom habitants' chats should be on the left (although this would make more sense if the chats when from the bottom up instead of the top down like how they do now... maybe fix that?). Then instead of names, use our profile pictures.
4. If we can't do the profile pictures thing, then we should have one of those color picker thingies for our names instead of picking between eye-bleeding or the murky colors. Just get rid of the color boxes entirely and replace it with one neat little button that opens a lil color picker.
5. /help and /rules should be in a little button somewhere we can find it when needed. Maybe a collapsible button that doesn't reload the page when you open or close it.
6. The list of users in a chatroom eventually goes away based on how long the user is activerly chatting. That list should just be gotten rid of entirely and replaced with a dropdown participants list. Unless the person has used /away or when they leave the room, then their name goes away.
7. The > and < characters can't be used in chatrooms or it does something like ";gt". It's not a big deal, but I'd prefer to have them for my lil faces. >-> >////< >:3
8. You can't use BBcodes in chatrooms. This should be allowed, more particularly using the bold, underline, strike,
spoiler buttons
, big, small, caps, and color. Add the code for links because it would be more helpful than whatever command is supposed to do that.
9. We can't use images via figure tags in chatrooms. Allow us to use it.
10. I'm not complaining about admins themselves, it's their name colors in the list. They have red. That's not pretty. Give them a lil star instead because they deserve gold stars.
11. THERE ARE NO BOTS! Why isn't there an interactive bot in there?? If admins aren't available, then use the bot! Make the bot give a lil warning if anyone does bad stuff. And give the bot a cool name. Also, include the bot in the participant list.
12. There are some commands that no one really uses, and some of them should be renamed. I think I'll make a separate Help Desk regarding commands. I'll follow-up. Plus, using the commands should center that text, NOT IN A CHAT BUBBLE, in the chat.
13. One thing that would be kinda cool is to make a tab in the chatrooms menu labelled "Groups". Then in a group, the owner can start a chatroom with the chatroom being named after that group. It would be cool for groups like my Christmas group and GuiedGui's Sea group, since those groups have events goin on.
14. I think at least 95% of the community here speaks mainly English, yes? I think we should just get rid of those foreign language groups entirely and do this instead: If someone needs a group for another language, have a button that says, "Open Language Room", and the user can manually pick the language they need and open the chatroom. Once the room is empty, the chatroom disappears.
15. Since now (in my mind), that space above the chatbox is cleared, it's just empty. There should be buttons there, and these are it:
-Participants (dropdown)
-Commands (dropdown)
-Rules (dropdown)
-Color picker (for names)
-Lil image search tab to look up our images?
-Back button (â†) to leave chatroom
AND DON'T HAVE THE PAGE RELOAD FOR ANY OF THESE (except the back button of course)!
16. If the page reloads, then that means the user is still there. It shouldn't say that they left and they're here.
17. I think the chatrooms would look significantly better after making these changes. We Stan. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Responses to the above:
1. I like this idea since TMJ is all but dead. Nobody will know what's going with the names. However, I'm not sure how easy it is to change the name of the chatrooms.
2. Not sure about this myself, deferring to someone with longer tenure than me.
3. The problem with something like speech bubbles is that it'll take up more room. As it is, it's very readable, I feel. Adding that kind of extra spacing will lead to even fewer visible messages, which I think is no good. I like the idea, though. Bottom-up scrolling will be interesting to add.
4. I second this. The infrastructure is already there, it just needs to be done on the client's side.
5. If the color picker is compressed, we could slot in the buttons there. Seconded.
6. The entire system for this is borked, but I don't like the idea of a dropdown menu. Mainly because that'd require scrolling around, which defeats the purpose of the layout of the chatrooms. The other tweak is agreeable, though.
7. This is due to preventing HTML injection in the site, but text is inserted differently here than in other places around the site. Until we can make that consistent to prevent HTML injection site-wide by doing what the chatroom does, it'll have to stay that way.
8. This is very intentional. The idea is to just have plain text, but I do feel like that idea is not good. Simple stuff like bold and strike I agree should be added in (not sure about spoilers tho). Links are done with /url or /link or something, and that alone is the reason why I agree with this.
9. This is very intentional. The idea was memory limitations for the DSi since scrolled-off chats are not pruned, and if images are constantly loaded, then it'll make the device run out of memory. In fact, I recall that Hull wrote something in the FAQ about this, although it's paintings.
10. I personally like the red. Is the color just objectionable?
11. Here we go with automated moderation... that's an entire can of worms and a half to deal with. Barring the technical difficulty of setting up such a thing, there's also false positives and false negatives that are bound to slip through. Humans can't really be replaced here, practically. The idea of an interactive bot for just spicing up the experience is nice, but I'm not sure if it'll be Hull's responsibility to set up such a thing.
12. (Deferred to follow-up)
13. ...I have no idea what you're trying to get at here. Is the shoutbox not enough? It seems like the purposes would be overlapping.
14. I disagree with this. The opening and closing of chatrooms I feel is unnecessary. Having that there in case anybody wants to take advantage of it is better, imo.
15. What I said for #5 I feel is a better solution since that does not require the user to scroll using a DSi. There's already a back button, btw. It's called "exit", though.
16. Reloading is pretty much exiting and then coming back, though. From the browser's perspective, at least. I don't know off the back of my hand how to remedy this, but if this can be fixed, it should.
17. On top of that, the styling on this site is rather bland, but that's just what happens when you make a programmer do graphic design. I'm VERY guilty of this myself.
And don't worry about the length of Helpdesks. Very good suggestions.
Although if you want to decrease the length of said Helpdesks, you could try to break them up into separate Helpdesks. I personally like to go by the rule of thumb "one issue per Helpdesk" so it's easier to read and comprehend. Bite-sized, if you will.
