Account editor

[Etan Reisner]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 04:10:43PM -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
> People are always getting confused by our account editor!

People are always getting confused by everything we do.

> Here are a few assorted thoughts:
> We use the term "Screen name" for every account; this is an AIMism,
> and we should probably have the prpl specify what to call this (e.g.
> UIN, JID, etc).

I have no problem changing away from 'Screen name' I just think a
consistent field name is a much better idea than one that constantly
changes. I would suggest something like 'Login' or 'Login ID' or 'Account
Name' (though that might lead people to think they are naming an account
like a Psi/Firefox profile or something).

> XMPP uses a complicated username split that separates the JID into
> three boxes, which tends to confuse people. I propose a single box,
> named JID, that takes 'seanegan at gmail.com/Work' If the resource (the
> /Work) part is omitted, we append the default.

I'm not a fan of doing this because (as a recent thread on the standards
XMPP mailing list has made clear) it gets us into the game of having to
deal intelligently with people pasting things like 'foo at mail@server.com'
into the screen name field. Which is perfectly clear and has only one
actual meaning as a JID but requires parsing to work out as opposed to
using separate entry boxes. (Not to mention making it more complicated to
pre-fill with a given server name, for things like the Google Talk
'protocol'.)

If we were trying to do something like this I would suggest that we keep
the three boxes but set them up thusly:

    Screen name: [     ] @ [     ] / [     ]

which should hopefully make clear enough to people what parts go where.
We could even consider dropping the resource specification entirely and
jump on the resources-are-for-the-service bandwagon and add a
'Description' (or something) field and push it as part of geoloc or some
other connection informative description.

> People still don't know what 'Local alias' is. Just today, my friend
> thought it would be the name of the group his friends from that
> account got added to. Perhaps defaulting it to "Me" might get the
> point across (Google Talk, for instance, shows all the messages you
> send as coming from "me:").

I think we've seen with the change to a default resource of 'Home' that
even what seem to be reasonable defaults doesn't really work. The whole
idea behind changing from 'Gaim' to 'Home' there was to get people to
realize that this was a field they could change because if they weren't at
home they would just naturally say "Oh, that field is clearly wrong I
should make it be more correct". Given the numbers of people that still
ask about it I would say that hasn't really worked.

> -s.

	-Etan