File talk:Live chat mock-up.png

(Discussion placed here to get over the archiving issue on Idea Lab) Hello, folks. It's observed that helpees in our IRC help channel (#wikipedia-en-help) sometimes find it confusing chatting on IRC ^{[Original research]}. The problems of the current live chat mechanism are:

Messages are unfiltered There may be several helpees seeking for help at the same time so the channel gets noisy from time to time, and some helpees are confused about which messages are sent to them.
Wikilinks need bots to parse There is a helpful bot in the channel named Helpmebot which translates Wikilinks like [[test]] to URLs with a simple command !link. This works well, but it may be better if the links are parsed automatically (by the helpees' client), reducing confusion.
IP addresses are revealed The IP addresses of the helpees (connected via freenode webchat) are revealed in their /whois result (They are automatically assigned a host name of something like gateway/web/freenode/ip.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), thus harming their security (every user can see it) and privacy (Hurray, we are all CheckUsers!)
Complicated to join Helpees need to choose a nickname (in some cases they are automatically assigned a random nickname like WPhelp-123) and enter a CAPTCHA when joining IRC though the web interface. Can we make it simpler?
No authentication How can we check if the helpee is actually the user he/she says to be?

There are various ways to solve the problem, including:

Make another webchat interface, integrated with the IRC (mock-up included). They will be given a host name (gateway cloak) based on their user name, like gateway/web/wikipedia/Username (This is not a Wikimedia cloak like wikipedia/Username and not subject to the 250-edit requirement, and this provides account ownership verification as well). The nicknames shown on the chat will be linked to the corresponding user pages (if available, the nickname-user association will be determined by the cloak). Additionally, helpers will be able to toggle some of the helpees' preferences (non-sensitive ones, via a bot command in the helper coordination channel #wikipedia-en-helpers), to help them enable/disable some settings (VisualEditor, for example). This requires support from freenode for the gateway cloak thing.
(coined by User:Gryllida) Add real-time messaging support to Flow. See Gryllida's comment below.

Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 08:17, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I understand this way helpees do not see eachothers' messages. Please -- please! -- don't differentiate between helpers and helpees. Granted highlights are of different colour,

they'll figure out who is talking to who;
helpees often help eachother;
there is no need to classify them as newbies -- this is depressing.

(Sarcastically, I'll stress it that I'm a newbie; I have a lot of things to learn still; but I'm quite capable of helping where I know an answer; I feel that helpers should be devoiced entirely, in #wikipedia-en-help, since newbies don't usually even notice, and since someone, while devoiced, being a nuisance is in no way a smaller problem than him doing that being voiced - it makes no effect.)

I will notice that the idea to integrate the chat into the wiki is not as unreasonable, however, it is a transparent environment, and we'd end up having to implement a way to save and potentially possibly moderate chat logs. We're only one step from mw:Flow here — it lets you view a page, eventually, in a very chat-like format, without having to reload a page to see new content (this is not yet implemented) or to add a message. (Hopefully it'd become more compact as time goes! And it would be possible to jigger things around and have them show up in any format you like. — as threads, as a big fat box with all messages in chronological order, or as a single thread.) On a side note, apparently the IP, wikilinks, authentication, and easiness of joining queries are solved there! --Gryllida (talk) 08:27, 8 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]