Why are you talking about Pidgin? this is about the pager..

Setting up Pidgin to talk to BYOND or whatever your interests are is NOT newbie friendly the whole point is to have many systems in one.

IM - BROWSER - CHAT ROOMS - ETC

I like the idea you have represented of using a third party system but it is too much of a hassle (although it's convenient) for everyone when BYOND already has the tools in place to modify the pager.

Forum_account wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by "BYOND layer", or even "messengers".

By "BYOND layer", I mean they would have to create BYOND accounts for use in these messengers, BYOND specific servers to handle the communication, and these chats would be specific between BYOND users. As for "messengers"... you do know what the "M" in "IM" stands for? and what this entire conversation seems to have become about? You were suggesting we use pidgin.

I don't know what this means. Here is a page that describes what XMPP features Pidgin supports: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ Protocol%20Specific%20Questions#XMPPJabberProtocol

So, no then? We wouldn't be able to implement any sort of custom features or limit which ones are already available.

Because we're talking about turning the pager into an IM client.

That's not what we're talking about. We may be focusing on the IM portion of things at the moment, and surely want a competent IM entity built into the pager, but that is not the entirety of what it should become.

If you want to launch a game, go to http://www.byond.com/games/. If you want to invite someone to a game you're playing, IM them the byond:// link to it. If you want to view the games your friends are playing, that could be handled by an alternate view of the games page.

The entire point of this new pager system is the exact opposite of all that. You should not have to separate using the website, chatting, sending game invites, viewing friends, and 100 other features, when really those should all be part of a single seamless experience.

If you have Pidgin installed it'd take about 10 seconds to add your BYOND chat account to it.

I think I may be completely against your idea now. I thought this would be some sort of automated system to replace the pager. If users have to download BYOND, create an account, then download pidgin and use their BYOND account there... What is the point of that? If they're going to do that, there are already far better solutions available, like just using pidgin with one of the 1000 already established messenger systems that it already supports. Considering you have to have an email address to create a BYOND account, and most email services also support IMing, people could just make use of that already...

[...] and it'd lead to many more feature requests (ex: chatrooms).

Feature requests are never a bad thing. If we could get the development of this new "pager" handled by somebody besides Lummox, then the workload wouldn't even be an issue. And chat rooms should be supported at launch.

It'd take a lot of work to make it capable of supporting realtime IM conversations. It'd be nice to have one integrated tool that handles this well but it'd take a *lot* of work. It'd also take a lot of interface work [...]

It really wouldn't be all that much work. If the BYOND staff would put in minimal effort on their end (which would improve BYOND as a whole in the process), then someone could build the entire new system for them with DM. In only about an hour, I had that functional mockup setup, and it already includes like 90% of the desired features.

Toddab503 wrote:

The real problem here can be described in one word. Separation. The website and the pager, IMer, or whatever you want to use should Not be separate from each other and more or less mirroring each other for the most part.

If it's important to have everything in one place, the easiest thing is to drop the pager entirely. People can do everything from the website already (including pager messaging).

If you want to have instant messaging and all other BYOND features in one place, the easiest way to achieve that is to put everything in the website (since most of the stuff is already there). They could use the same approach (and the same chat server) to provide messaging in the BYOND website - XMPP is the protocol that Gchat and Facebook chat use.

Falacy wrote:

I mean they would have to create BYOND accounts for use in these messengers,

That's really easy to do, one hour tops. Adding IM capabilities to the pager would take hundreds of man-hours of work. The pager's current means of communication is too slow and unreliable and it's not nearly sufficient for the features you'd like to see. There's a lot more to it than changing the interface to look more like an IM client.

BYOND specific servers to handle the communication,

This same concern exists for the current pager. BYOND would need to rent a web server or some type of server to run the chat server software on, but the chat server software is 100% already written.

and these chats would be specific between BYOND users.

I have no clue what that's supposed to mean. Are you saying that chats would only be between pairs of users? They could certainly set up chatrooms - XMPP servers and clients support that. Are you saying that you could only use this to chat with other BYOND users? That's a limitation of the current BYOND pager and it's not a limitation of XMPP. If you were using Pidgin you could be signed in to your BYOND chat account and your AIM account and send messages to people on both services. Also, XMPP servers can pass messages to users on other servers, so you could even message people in Gchat from your BYOND.com chat session.

Forum_account wrote:

If you want to have instant messaging and all other BYOND features in one place, the easiest way to achieve that is to put everything in the website (since most of the stuff is already there). They could use the same approach (and the same chat server) to provide messaging in the BYOND website - XMPP is the protocol that Gchat and Facebook chat use.

That is true, but it is likely to result in users having to browse through several web pages to do everything they want; either that or keep multiple tabs up. Both of which I already stated would likely be far from ideal for many users. I do see your points, but there has got to be a better way to do this somehow.

Maybe a variation of some things I saw done for handling Super Smash Brothers Brawl matches would work. With that, you could go to www.smashboards.com for most information, forum features, etc, and visit fsmash.org to chat via IM and request matches, accept matches, etc. I'm not familiar with the details behind how they set that up, but I suspect your all in one website idea could work much better and more efficiently if BYOND could build something like fsmash into the BYOND website. It seemed to have some basic custom features for Smash, so I imagine BYOND could work its features in as well.

Forum_account wrote:

Since they have a standalone client for pager messaging it should be better than it is. Having IM-style messaging would be nice, but it's not necessary. If they got rid of the communication aspect of the pager and made messaging only accessible through the site - even in it's current form (just call it "private messages", which is something many forums have), I think everyone would be happy with it's capabilities. A private message feature doesn't beg to be improved but the pager's messaging does.

Edit: I meant to mention that the XMPP website lists 15+ browser-based XMPP clients and 9 JavaScript XMPP libraries that could be used to make a custom BYOND chat client in the browser.

Hm. This really is a very debatable topic. Those links were only for a bit of an example, they could execute the idea much better than it was there I imagine. If you want a very basic option, there is always the little meebo bar thing along the bottom of the website. I've seen a few sites, like gaiaonline, link their websites user names and such into the bar as well. That's a very minimal method, though; only good for quick and easy implementation. Now that you mention that in your edit, that may be better.

Usually the only bad thing about browser based IM clients is when you have to browse a lot of pages, and the IM's sometimes get messed up by loading other pages. Meebo's bar, for example, acts a little odd about that. Facebooks is buggy in general, just more randomly.

Everyone will probably want something different when it comes to this topic, with few agreeing on one thing, but I think we all agree that a change is a must and a all in one is a must. The BYOND Staff may have to choose the method, because I for one could debate this for ages. There's so many options that it's probably tougher to choose than it is to execute.

I disagree that "a change is a must", because the pager does what it was intended to do-- allow people to message users for the purpose of hooking up in games (hence the "join" button). I think, as usual, a minority of users is making this out to be a much bigger problem than it really is.

Truthfully, we are somewhat moving away from the pager setup in preparation for having more games available on-site via the Flash. That's one of the reasons we updated to this new site alert system with improved messaging/updates.

I do like the idea of a Kongregate-type system for chatting from within a hub entry. Although honestly that seems mostly beneficial for single-player games (not really BYOND's specialty) or for games that aren't currently hosted (that is, to augment the "waiting list" experience). I'm not sure it's a huge bonus either way.

The "join" thing is a bug (thought it was fixed), so we'll have to see what's up with that.

I don't think the lack of instant-instant messaging is a huge problem, but if we were to improve it, it would make sense to go the route FA suggests and use an existing protocol. I have some reservations outside of the workload as I don't know what the server-side repercussions are. The reason we use a polling pager and not an IM is so we don't have to keep a persistent connection (which is going to have connection limits and keep the server more busy, although that isn't nearly the issue with our new setup).

Tom wrote:

I don't think the lack of instant-instant messaging is a huge problem

It isn't that the lack of IMing is a huge problem, but that having it would be a huge benefit.

but if we were to improve it, it would make sense to go the route FA suggests and use an existing protocol.

If you can somehow integrate these into the pager automatically, then perhaps. If I have to go download some external messenger program, on top of BYOND, as FA seems to be suggesting, then it makes the entire concept pointless. I already have external messengers to do just that.

I have some reservations outside of the workload as I don't know what the server-side repercussions are.

Well, if DM was functional enough to handle all of the desired features, none of that would be an issue at this point. I could have already rebuilt the entire pager and could be hosting the mockup from my server.

Falacy wrote:

If you can somehow integrate these into the pager automatically, then perhaps. If I have to go download some external messenger program, on top of BYOND, as FA seems to be suggesting, then it makes the entire concept pointless. I already have external messengers to do just that.

I agree. I wouldn't want to use an outside app, but maybe it's not a big deal to integrate the pager with some kind of external third party chat server.

Well, if DM was functional enough to handle all of the desired features, none of that would be an issue at this point. I could have already rebuilt the entire pager and could be hosting the mockup from my server.

The main problem is that byond games can't realistically handle 5000+ persistent connections (any game that does this is decentralized with more complex networking). Without a persistent connection, to do IM-ing you have to poll, which is what we do. We've thought about compromising here, for instance, keeping users with recent activity connected to the hub so that their pages would go through instantly. But it can be a complicated problem and one that we didn't think was really too important since the main purpose of the pager is just to serve as a means to find out where your friends are. But now that there are open sourced third party alternatives, perhaps this problem is solved for us.

Tom wrote:

I do like the idea of a Kongregate-type system for chatting from within a hub entry. Although honestly that seems mostly beneficial for single-player games (not really BYOND's specialty) or for games that aren't currently hosted (that is, to augment the "waiting list" experience). I'm not sure it's a huge bonus either way.

Having any kind of unified chat would be great for games that aren't MMORPG-type games (in other words, games that don't have one large server with all the players). Imagine having an RTS game that supports up to 8 players but had a chatroom that spanned all game instances (even non-hosted ones). It'd be much easier to find people to play against if you could instantly send messages to all other people playing the same game.

It'd probably be useful for MMO-type games too. You can't support that many people per server, so if a BYOND game were to have thousands of players they'd need to be split across many servers (ex: 50 players on each of 20 servers). Having a way for BYOND to handle the chat so you can have universal chat across all 20 servers would be great. Chat in MMO games is probably most often used for asking questions (where do I get this item? How do I do this quest? etc.), so making each question reach 999 people instead of 49 people increases the chances it'll get an answer.

There's no easy way for BYOND games to set this up on their own, and if BYOND might be adding a better form of chat then it'd be easy to expose it to all games. Though, if the chat is done within the hub entry and the game is played in Dream Seeker, I'm not sure how helpful it'd be.

Also, single player games aren't BYOND's specialty (most games support multiplayer), but that doesn't mean that games are never run in single player mode. Even though Epic is a multiplayer game, most people play it by themselves (at least at first they do). Being able to play a BYOND game by yourself is absolutely one of BYOND's specialties. The reason why BYOND's small group multiplayer games don't do well is because many don't offer any type of single player mode and it's hard to find people to play with. If the single player mode's in-game chat was connected to a chatroom that all other people playing the same game are also in, it'd be a lot easier for people to play these games.

I don't think the lack of instant-instant messaging is a huge problem, but if we were to improve it, it would make sense to go the route FA suggests and use an existing protocol. I have some reservations outside of the workload as I don't know what the server-side repercussions are. The reason we use a polling pager and not an IM is so we don't have to keep a persistent connection (which is going to have connection limits and keep the server more busy, although that isn't nearly the issue with our new setup).

I'm not sure what they are either. I don't know what kind of server you have or how taxing the chat protocol is. It can run in a browser over HTTP so I don't think it requires persistent connections, though it probably does use persistent connections for users who aren't connected via HTTP.

Falacy wrote:

If you can somehow integrate these into the pager automatically, then perhaps. If I have to go download some external messenger program, on top of BYOND, as FA seems to be suggesting, then it makes the entire concept pointless. I already have external messengers to do just that.

There are XMPP client libraries that BYOND can use if they want to create their own interface in the pager.