FRIEND LIST (social feature)

[erik90mx]

Hi,

Recently I knew some newcomers in Drawpile, and they wanted to contact me thought Drawpile for future drawings sessions, so I asked a few questions and tried to analyse the case:

• They were thinking that Drawpile was focus on be a "social platform" (with a canvas as a mean to communicate more) because the chat was the first thing that catch their attention at the begginig.
• The avatars and the labels "Register" for the users give a more strong point to them, and make them think we have an official way to communicate without leave Drawpile (other than use Discord or another proprietary software)
• They were very "cautious" to give personal contact info (they were new, so don't trust, and its normal), so they wanted to contact only through Drawpile for drawing.
• After a little bit, they registered in the Drawpile web.

Currently if you want to found a Drawpile's friend inside the software (that doesn't pick random usernames and that you don't have his/her contact info):

• You have to remember their username (or avatar) by memory.
• You have to go manually session by session looking for your friend.
• In each session that you come in, you need to scroll through the user lists to search for her/him and read every single username.

Those are the normal steps. When you have friends in Drawpile usually you know in which places they could be or share personal contact info to be in touch through third party proprietary software, but lets stick to that cases where they want to protect that info.

It will be an interesting idea to have a friend list (as for example the one that steam have):

• Where you can see you friend usernames list with avatars.
• Where you can see if they are connected or not.
• Where you can contact them by chat.
• Where you can invite to a session easy.

Nothing complex like creating groups or to have management tools, but just to contact. Maybe this issue is related to this ones: https://github.com/drawpile/Drawpile/issues/400 https://github.com/drawpile/Drawpile/issues/451 https://github.com/drawpile/Drawpile/issues/705

Regards

[callaa]

This would be an interesting feature, but requires more design work. Some part of it has to be implemented on the website side but I'm not yet clear how it should all work.

The friend list feature would only work for users with a registered account, that's for sure at least. There is simply no other way to keep track of users.

So, I believe this would mostly be a feature of the website.

[erik90mx]

Maybe the actual area of the chat can be used to implement this, a I was thinking if it will possible to create a new tab in the user list, to get the friend list:

I guess some points to consider will be:

• As a receiver, when somebody send you a message, it will appears in all your open instances of Drawpile? (yes it is very normal to have more than 1 open)
• The sender and receiver chat, should be synced between the instances?
• Whe should consider to have just 1 instance of the friend list (like a floating window) to avoid redundancy?
• When you first enter to Drawpile (without join a session), it should prompt you to log in to change your status to connected and access to your online friend list?

Regards