Conversation

Notices

  1. Wondering if there's a somewhat sensible way to have short server aliases.

    Some servers like community.highlandarrow.com have rather long names. It would be nice to shorten that.

    The image illustrates the problem:  https://community.highlandarrow.com/attachment/98277

    Compare to: https://community.highlandarrow.com/attachment/98278

    Saturday, 07-Jan-17 10:31:05 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
    1. @verius I think the idea of having a table of server aliases and icons for different servers isn't a bad one.  We could use favicons to get the icon easily.  Maybe a config variable that gets exposed in the config API for the alias.

      Saturday, 07-Jan-17 11:40:39 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
      1. @maiyannah The main problem I see is: who decides which servers get which aliases?

        A central authority makes such things easy but isn't very desirable, having the server admins seems simple but how would an unknown server get a shortcode?

        Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:01:06 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
        1. @verius Why not make it look for that config variable and have it fall back to said central table or an algorithmic determination for ones that don't report an alias?

          Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:03:09 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
          1. @maiyannah Say user A@A wants to message user B@VeryLongName through shortcode B. How would server A know which shortcode B refers to?

            Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:05:24 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
            1. @verius Why would we have to have this at the transit level?  Easy enough to just make it on the client end and use the full code at the transit level.  The end user wouldn't know the difference.

              Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:07:23 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
              1. @maiyannah Sure. But then the question will be how does the client of A know which shortcode B refers to?

                Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:09:01 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                1. @verius If it's something the server's assigned, it should be in the configuration API point.  Should probably save ones you make up internally to some sort of file.

                  Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:17:18 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                  1. @maiyannah Just so we're clear. Are you talking about the server of the client sending a message using a shortcode or the receiving server which is referred to using a shortcode?

                    Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:18:25 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                    1. @verius I would keep the shortcodes internal to a client.  This way, you could get away with allowing users to set their own aliases for a server as well.

                      Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:26:37 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                      1. @maiyannah So the user would have to set the shortcodes for every server they wish to communicate with manually?

                        Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:27:26 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                        1. @verius That wouldn't be neccesary if it's entirely internal to the client.

                          Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:33:11 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                          1. @maiyannah If the client is supposed to show verius@community.highlandarrow.com as verius@HLA how would it know that community.highlandarrow.com maps to HLA without either the user or the server telling it that?

                            Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:39:18 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                            1. @verius Well you could have the more popular sites preprogrammed too. Maybe just an easily editable text file with domain => shortname mapping that bundles with the software.

                              Saturday, 07-Jan-17 14:56:28 UTC from social.umeahackerspace.se at 63°49'42"N 20°15'34"E
                              1. @mmn Unfortunately easy editable and android don't go together (or easy and android in general for that matter). But since I'd like users to be able to add their own servers there's no problem having some kind of user overrides for defaults delivered by means of a text file, local or hosted somewhere.

                                Saturday, 07-Jan-17 15:27:39 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                                1. @verius All Android devices I use (none of them Google-locked of course) tend to have a file manager and text editor either directly available or installable via # .)
                                  (but I was more thinking of just making it easy for possible forkers to make their own community-oriented clients with slightly different defaults, so maybe they don't have to recompile a bunch of stuff and just switch the text files? but I don't know how Android packaging works, maybe it's not that simple)

                                  Saturday, 07-Jan-17 15:59:39 UTC from social.umeahackerspace.se at 63°49'42"N 20°15'34"E
                                  1. @mmn Packaging isn't that hard, but you probably don't want 10 subtly different apps in the Play Store as that gets confusing for people.

                                    But customization for a particular community is an interesting thought.

                                    Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:34:56 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
              2. @maiyannah So if I send a message to maiyannah@hla the client would translate that to maiyannah@community.highlandarrow.com. If another user sees that message and has shortcode chl assigned for community.highlandarrow.com it's client would show maiyannah@chl.

                Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:20:43 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
    2. @verius I'd probably use favicons to identify different servers. When posting, if your client uses the Atom Publishing Protocol instead of crappy twittercrAPI, you can construct the HTML any way you want so maybe the known full name of the user is the visible text while maintaining the URI as href="" value.

      Saturday, 07-Jan-17 12:35:34 UTC from social.umeahackerspace.se at 63°49'42"N 20°15'34"E
    3. @verius why not use a dual usage app?

      Saturday, 07-Jan-17 15:41:19 UTC from web
      1. @rainyman You mean having an option to use shortened server names? That's probably what it's going to be.

        Saturday, 07-Jan-17 15:50:57 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
        1. @verius Well if the option works some way, why not?

          Saturday, 07-Jan-17 15:55:08 UTC from web
          1. @rainyman I think you're misunderstanding. This convo is about how shortnames would work. It's not a feature that's supported anywhere yet.

            Saturday, 07-Jan-17 15:57:20 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
            1. @verius Actually i am aware of this, it is just trying to see it from another angle.

              Saturday, 07-Jan-17 15:58:40 UTC from web
            2. @verius Is the shorthand the problem or the lack of a feature to accomodate it?

              Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:02:09 UTC from web
              1. @rainyman The shorthand is a possible solution to the problem of having really long names. But that solution has some tricky bits.

                Come to think of it though, it may just be the wrong solution. Qvitter already doesn't show the domain and that rarely gives problems. Though with Qvitter it's easy enough to infer the domain using the domain icon (at least on community.highlandarrow.com) and by mouseovering a person's name.

                So maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree and should simply make it easy to get information about the users of a message.

                Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:33:42 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                1. @verius oh, now i am trying to wrap my mind over that domain icon etc.

                  Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:41:50 UTC from web
                  1. @rainyman I think that's a custom patch by @maiyannah

                    Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:44:00 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                    1. @verius @rainyman The icons we have right now in Qvitter, is just a CSS hack, which was originally actually done by @moonman for SPC, I just took it and ran with it.  It would be nice to have something similar in a client though.  Grabbing the favicon seems an easy way to do it.

                      Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:45:22 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                      1. @maiyannah @moonman @rainyman It's something I'm considering adding, though on a 4" screen space is tight so it's a bit tricky to get right.

                        Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:46:32 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                        1. @verius Man it's going to be fun when you're optimizing things for the 98754398348943 entirely "standard" android screen sizes, huh?

                          Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:51:21 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                          1. @maiyannah Which is why in Android you specify just about everything as device independent pixels or stuff like that.

                            And I have a simple optimization strategy: it should work well on my 4" phone and my 7" tablet. Any smaller than 4" is not going to work, bigger than 7" will just have some bigger letters.

                            Saturday, 07-Jan-17 17:22:19 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                            1. @verius FWIW I can test it on my Acer phone too when its ready for that

                              Saturday, 07-Jan-17 17:23:11 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                              1. @maiyannah Well the good news about Android is that it's really easy to have the emulator use different sizes so real world testing can wait pretty long, but thanks for the offer.

                                Saturday, 07-Jan-17 17:24:52 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                      2. @maiyannah what icons? I see them not.

                        Saturday, 07-Jan-17 18:05:29 UTC from web
                        1. @rainyman You would only see them if you are viewing things from my instance.

                          Saturday, 07-Jan-17 18:10:18 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                          1. @maiyannah Ahh yes..

                            Saturday, 07-Jan-17 18:10:54 UTC from web
                2. @verius What I personally would do is have the name, then an icon beside it (instance favicon)  then another icon that's a "?" symbol or something to get full user information.  Spacing and sizes would need some fussing, but I think that could work.

                  Saturday, 07-Jan-17 16:59:13 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                  1. @maiyannah A wise woman told me to use big buttons.

                    While what you suggest works well for a desktop environment where you have a mouse it won't work that well with fat fingers. I'm already hesitant to use toolbars with more than 5 buttons due to the fatty finger effect.

                    Saturday, 07-Jan-17 17:23:54 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com
                    1. @verius I have an idea for this which I'll knock up a prototype or whatever you'd call it in photoshop next I'm on my computer.

                      Saturday, 07-Jan-17 17:24:52 UTC from community.highlandarrow.com