GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 676109
Fewer status types
Last modified: 2018-05-22 15:31:52 UTC
Right now, Empathy includes five different status types: Available, Busy, Away, Invisible and Offline. This gives users a lot to choose from, and some of the options don't make sense. Fewer options would make the UI more elegant and easier to understand. * Available - seems necessary. * Busy - if I'm busy, I'm online but I am not responding to messages. You can certainly ask why someone doesn't just go offline/invisible in that situation. It's worth noting that busy gets used for the shell's notifications switch. Status is set to busy to communicate that the user is online but is not aware of messages that are coming in. It says 'I will get your message, but may not respond straight away'. * Away - conceptually this is similar to busy. It means online but will not immediately respond. It is confusing to have this as a manual user option. We automatically set the status to away if the user is idle; having the option there means that people think they have to do this manually. * Invisible - enables chats to be initiated while preventing others from contacting you. This is sneaky behaviour, but it can be useful in some circumstances. * Offline - if we include invisible, this could be a duplicate. The other possible use case is to preserve bandwidth if it is costly or restricted, this case could be addressed with a system-wide data-roaming switch, perhaps. I think we should definitely remove away and discuss whether busy, invisible and offline are needed also. It is useful to compare these options with what other networks provide: * Facebook - online/offline * Google - available, busy, invisible, signed out Also note that custom status messages still allow people to express their state. You can have your status set to available and write 'busy' if you want to.
IIRC some services do not support "postponed" message delivery (storing the message on the server) if the person is really offline and the message not deliverable. Merging away and busy makes sense but I'm afraid that we would need a good new word that covers both situations otherwise we end up with "where did status $foo go" bug reports and heated discussions. I wonder if we could reach out and ask which statuses users use and which ones they consider "mergeable" or rarely used, but that might end up in bikeshed.
(In reply to comment #1) ... > Merging away and busy makes sense but I'm afraid that we would need a good new > word that covers both situations otherwise we end up with "where did status > $foo go" bug reports and heated discussions. ... If you're away we automatically set the status for you. Why does someone need manual control over that?
Playing the devil's advocate: When is it automatically set? If I lock the screen? Some people don't do this when there is nobody else around. After 10min of inactivity? I might want to set "Away" directly when I leave, so it is more accurate by covering also the time until it automatically sets it. IMHO, for a manual "away" status there is no good reason, but I guess GNOME cannot automatically recognize when I'm "busy". Yet. :)
Andre: I think you pretty much nailed it with the two cases. A timer of inactivity or an explicit lock should both trigger away.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/empathy/issues/542.