New Sound Event

[Damian Eads]

Hi,

I've been using Pidgin/Gaim for over a decade and love it! One common
thing I and my colleagues do is set all the sounds off. With a large
buddy list and lots of buddies messaging, coming and going, the sounds
can get really distracting, especially when someone's trying to
concentrate on work. However, occassionally, someone (let's say Alice)
will try to get ahold of me (or vice versa) for hours but the gaim
window will get lost in a sea of windows. At lunch, Alice might say to
me "Why did you turn your sounds off? I needed to talk to you about
the meeting this afternoon!" And I'll say, "I turn them off because if
they were on, I would never get any work done!"

I propose the following feature: Whenever someone messages you X times
without receiving a response in Y minutes, play a sound. For example,
if my friend Alice messages me 3 times in the past 20 minutes, play a
beep. Now, that's much less distracting and it unobtrusively notifies
me that she needs me. One nice property of this feature is that there
is no way for any one person to flood me with tons of messages in a Y
minute period and generate more than a single beep.

Thoughts?

Thanks again for the great software!

Regards,

Damian Eads