Fwd: RE: Help with Pidgin

[Paul Aurich]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: Help with Pidgin
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:41:15 +0200
From: Barbara Berest <bberest at t-com.me>
To: 'Paul Aurich' <darkrain42 at pidgin.im>

Dear Paul:

Thanks a lot for your suggestions.  Actually, I asked Olark a number of
these things and they said to check with my IM people which would be you.  I
haven't got a lot of time to experiment and my IT guy who could answer these
questions for me NEVER answers my emails!  Where's the violin? :)  I'll
figure it all out.  Thanks for the time!

Barbara

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Aurich [mailto:darkrain42 at pidgin.im]
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2010 5:15 AM
To: Barbara Berest
Cc: support at pidgin.im
Subject: Re: Help with Pidgin

On 2010-07-24 14:40, Barbara Berest wrote:
> *I am using Pidgin with Olark on my website to provide live chat support
> to my visitors.  I do not have any experience in this and have several
> questions:*

I'm unfamiliar with Olark, but many of these questions are better aimed
at them, especially as it looks like it's a for-pay service.

> 
> * *
> 
>    1. *In the case that several visitors seek to chat at the same time
>       while my operator (I just have one operator per shift) is already
>       chatting with a customer, is there some way for the operator to
>       send an automatic message to the rest of the visitors waiting in
>       queue to chat, such as 'one moment please.'?  Would the buddy
>       pounce have something to do with this issue?*

It depends on how Olark "exposes" visitors to the operator, but an
auto-reply message might work (you'd want to set it to "Auto-reply when
away").  I don't recall the exact specifics of how that setting
interacts with an *on-going* conversation (i.e. the active one), and how
it works with XMPP (which does not have protocol-level auto-reply
messages), so you'd want to experiment with it.

>    2. *I use Pidgin to communicate with any visitor to my website.  Are
>       all visitors automatically my Buddies?  I need to be buddies with
>       anyone who signs in to my website.  Is this possible?  Without
>       knowing who they are beforehand.*

This is an Olark-specific question.

>    3. *Can I Buddy Pounce on any visitor to my website automatically? 
>       To configure this, what would I input for "Account" and "Buddy
>       name" again, if I do not know them beforehand (as in question 2
>       above).*

Probably not.  Pounces are typically tied to a specific user, not a
group.  There may be a plugin or two (look at the ThirdPartyPlugins page
on Pidgin's development wiki) that allow you to have some sort of
"bounce" functionality per-group, though.

>    4. *Should I be able to track a visitor to my website?  To know which
>       page of my website he visiting at one moment or another? How can I
>       do this?*

This is an Olark-specific question.

~Paul



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