Better UI for back-and-forth whispering

[lazerwalker]

Right now, whispers show up in the chat feed along with all other chat messages. If somebody whispers to you and you want to respond, you need to type /whisper or click their name and choose "Whisper".

This is very MUD-y, but makes private 1:1 conversations awkward. We probably want a better UI for this.

Could be some or all of the following:

• There is a selector next to the text box that lets you switch back to talking to everyone (the "normal" MMO design solution)
• After you've whispered to someone, prepopulate the text field with /whisper user until you send a non-whisper message
• You can click a whispered message to prepopulate a /whisper to the sender
• A dedicated separate UI for viewing 1:1 chats with different people

The last is the most Slack/Discord-y. It's also the most work. It's also the design choice that most encourages people to send a lot of 1:1 messages instead of chatting in public. So there's a philosophical question about what behavior we want to encourage.

[lazerwalker]

I think the most important thing here is the last item. I think this is a few things:

1. When you DM someone, or they DM you, programmatically open their profile view in the side pane
2. The profile view screen should show your DM history with that person (read: all WhisperMessages either to them or from them) in a scrollable box
3. The profile view should have a separate input + send button that sends a DM to them (read: take the input from the box and prepend "/whisper [username]" before sending to the server)

[annie]

am i right in assuming that this only requires a client change? if so, i can work on it next!

[lazerwalker]

Yep, this should be client-side only!

[annie]

FYI i'm gonna take a stab at making the profile view look nicer + adding Whisper messages there.

a couple things i'm thinking about:

• i'm gonna tweak the grid columns because the middle column looks way too wide right now after the CSS changes i made 😅
• should we show Whisper notifications somewhere, instead of auto-opening the chat view whenever someone receives a message? i'm a bit worried that auto-opening the chat would be disorienting. i might try adding a little icon in the top right corner that shows a notification badge whenever you have a new unread Whisper message

oh also, it seems like i'm no longer a Collaborator so i can't self-assign. nbd if that was intentional, but feel free to assign this to me!

[lazerwalker]

• Tweaking the grid columns sounds 👍

• Yeah, I think a notification badge makes sense! If it's helpful when you're looking for how to style it, we're already using the free tier of https://fontawesome.com in the app, via react-icons/fa.

• The admin UI is showing that your Collaborator status is pending you accepting the invite. GitHub makes it opt-in as an anti-harassment thing, you need to actively click the link in the email you were sent. I think literally every single collaborator on this repo has made the same mistake 😂

[annie]

lmaooooo i didn't even see that email!! 🤦‍♀️ good to know it wasn't just me

& thank you, fontawesome looks great!

[lazerwalker]

(Manually assigned this to you for now)

[annie]

hey sorry for the delay, been a lil burnt out from work 😞 gonna try to get a PR out for this today!

[lazerwalker]

No worries! Taking care of yourself is far more important than our silly little project :)

Looking to seeing something when it's ready!