Hi,
I like the idea of only allowing logged-in users who have given a valid email address to use the chat from the website directly, and to use their user name (with a pre- or suffix). However, implementing this will not happen overnight, and this will only help against trolls. We do have a bug report for improving the IRC plugin here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape-web/+bug/1233868 which contains a request for this already. I'd like to invite the programmers among us to help with this - we are only two people who currently work on improving the website's internals, and one of these two is only a beginner (guess who ;) ). (We are currently focusing on database updating and stability problems, so the website will work *at all* when being updated.)
However, this change cannot protect our chat volunteers from being asked questions in the wrong language, and it will probably not make people a lot more patient.
* I'm not sure if the chat volunteers really want to send mails after people who logged out too early? I personally would not go to such lengths... although I would find that extremely nice by anyone, even if it were automated. This would be possible if usernames were associated with the chat plugin. But it also would somehow defeat the interactive aspect. We have the answers section on launchpad for people whose questions are less urgent. Should we link to that from the Chat page as a short-time solution?
* The language problem (how frequent is it? Which languages are concerned most?) might be the easiest to solve:
- like it was already done for the French website translation, we can change the plugin to auto-login to the inkscape-channel in the language of the translation (if it exists). - we can add the word 'English' (in bold, if necessary) to all other versions of the Chat page (German already has this in two places, non-bold) - some people might still try it in their own language despite this, because there is no channel in their language, and they hope to be lucky, and don't speak English well enough. While this is probably quite annoying, I wouldn't blame them for trying... There *is* a chance that someone does speak their language, it's not zero - there may be some other user from their country logged in.
* I'm not sure there exists a solution for the 'patience problem'. I myself am guilty of not wanting to wait longer than 20 minutes (I don't know what the usual wait time is in Inkscape-user, so don't pin me to a specific amount of time here!). People have things to do, and they move on to look for a solution elsewhere, they may even do a web search in parallel and have found a solution when they log out. We had a hint to wait for 10-15 minutes in the text about the chat applet. Is this too short? How long should it be?
Regards, Maren
Am 20.05.2015 um 11:31 schrieb Jabier Arraiza:
I like the first one, in the second one: Publicy email as username in IRC or made a intermediate step in the website? This can be mailed with the help of a bot using only IRC client like inkbot make with some URL?
Regards, Jabier.
On Tue, 2015-05-19 at 22:46 -0700, Josh Andler wrote:
One quick thought, what about some form of login to the website being required to participate via irc? We give social media logins as an option, so the bar isn't too high.
I also think that asking for email as a requirement so we can followup, if they are impatient, still allows us to help them in whatever capacity is feasible. I've got no problem troubleshooting if our schedules happen to not align.
Cheers, Josh On May 19, 2015 10:20 PM, "Bryce Harrington" <bryce@...961...> wrote:
It's come to my attention that our website IRC client, which provides a convenient means for users to ask a quick question, is causing a lot of frustration amongst our volunteers on the channel who are trying to provide support and manage the channel.
There's three issues that I'm aware of:
Drive by's:
Very often people will log in, shoot off a question that is easily answered, then depart before anyone has a chance to answer it.
Language:
Often people will express questions in their native language. As our current support volunteers only include English speakers, this just isn't going to work out.
Anonyminity:
The nice thing about the IRC client is since it doesn't require login credentials, it's quick and easy to use. The downside is we have no idea who the person is. This means no way to contact them out of band (e.g. shoot them an email with the answer to their question, or post it to their inkscape.org account), and no way to ban people who behave abusively (the channel op can kill the session, but the troll could just re-login.)
There may well be other issues, but I think this is representative.
Compounding the problem, I think the IRC support crew feel a bit disempowered: The web irc client is part of the website and thus maintained by the website maintainers.
The easiest solution would be to switch off the irc client on the website, or for the IRC support staff to set /ignore (or worse) on "inkscaper*". But these don't really *solve* the problems, they just brush them under the rug.
Are there other changes (maybe minor tweaks, maybe major re-thinks) that would address these problems while still helping users get answers to their questions, quickly and/or interactively?
Bryce