Persistent chat rooms

[Ka-Hing Cheung]

On Mon, 2007-07-23 at 11:39 -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
> This is an idea that has been requested a bunch in one form or another
> for a while now. I described it in #pidgin yesterday and want to
> formalize it here and see what people think.
> 
> Right now you can add a chat room (IRC channel, Jabber conference,
> etc.) to your buddy list, where double-clicking it will join the room.
> Additionally, if you right-click it and select "auto-join," that room
> will be automatically joined when the account connects.
> 
> I'm proposing changing "Auto-join" to "Always-in," or "Persistant," or
> some word that actually describes what's going on.
> 
> When this setting is on, Pidgin will join the chat when it connects
> and stay in the chat as long as the setting is on. When you close the
> chat window, you will not leave the chat. Double-clicking the icon in
> the buddy list will merely re-show the window, with the full backlog
> and everything. You'll get alerted when someone says your name in the
> chat. We'll probably want at least one more blist icon to represent
> the different chat states. We'll also show the chat topic in the buddy
> list.
> 
> I think this sounds like a generally useful idea, and think we should
> do it. Is it worth over-riding the "Auto-join" functionality with this
> entirely, or just adding a new option in addition to it?

I am not opposed to this idea, as long as there will be a easy way to
leave the channel temporarily without unsetting the "Always-in".

Also, for a moderate-busy channel, showing the backlog can take a long
time. Right now on my 3 years old computer showing a 154K log file takes
about half a second, and that's only a single day's log (2007-05-11 on
d at c.p.i). I wouldn't call d at c.p.i moderate, it's probably more on the
light side. For a busier channel with a couple day's backlog, I imagine
it can easily take more than a couple seconds, and people may end up
keeping the window always open anyway.

-khc