Modern XMPP project discussion - 2021-02-04

> The client MUST sort the contact list. Either in lexicographical order by contact name or chronologically by the time of the last message exchanged with that contact. Do others agree with this? I'd like to propose that it says that it MUST NOT sort by last message exchanged as this in my experience just causes you to click the wrong chat because the one you were going for got re-ordered to the top right as you went to click on it

(or maybe it could say that if it does sort that way it must not re-order while the list has focus or something)

sam, I don’t especially like this behaviour, but I know it’s in use in Mattermost and probably other Slack clones (maybe even Slack itself, never tried it), so it would “feel modern” to do so maybe?

Slack sorts lexically, I'm aware of no commercial messengers that randomly reorder contacts (except Mattermost now that you've told me, I guess)

actually, let me check; I don't think Google Meet does but I'm not 100% sure. We use that as a backup if Slack goes down at work

Chat rather, Meet is the video thing

Note that I also haven’t used Mattermost since 2017, it may have evolved since then.

Actually, that was dumb, I have no way to tell because Slack is not down so no one is online and there will be no traffic… looks lexical by default, but maybe it would reorder if someone was talking, I dunno

sam, Conversations and my SMS application also sort by last activity.

Conversations does? Maybe it doesn't update while the list is open? For whatever reason I've never had it do the thing where I go to click a contact then it moves out from under me

Yeah, computers reordering items while you are trying to click one. Horrible thing.

hmm, this room is at the top for me though (minus some favorites)

and there it goes re-ordering. Maybe I just normally don't notice it because the couple of rooms I use regularly are pinned to the top

But yah, I don't fully understand why it's been less noticeable in conversatiosn to me, maybe I just use my desktop more, but it still seems like a bad idea

You could probably just ... not reorder anything while you hover at the tabs or list items. Browsers do that with tabs .

Do browsers re-order tabs at all unless you drag the tabs around?

no but what would be the reason they need to do that?

Not reorder, but resize and slide around.

oh gotcha, yah, that makes sense

yeah but they do that only when you click something

not by an external event

I don't think I've ever noticed that, but now that you mention it I've never had tabs move out from under me and I have noticed them resize later after I closed a bunch or something, that makes sense.

I'm thinking that if you just hold off on the reordering-by-recent-message-timestamp while the user has the pointer in that area, accidents would be less likely to happen

oh yah, just did it, that's clever and works very nicely. The best design is the design you don't notice that saves you from closing the wrong thing.

but clients have a reason to do that

the reason is if you have a long chatlist that needs to be scrolled

and your last contact ha a unread message

you dont want to scroll through the whole list to find the unread message

thats the problem we try to solve

I dunno, scrolling seems fine in <commercial messenger>

The way Slack solves that is with a "More Unread ↓" thing at the bottom that scrolls down for you I think. Zashs solution would work too though: do re-ordering except when the mouse is hovering. If you want it to re-sort, move the mouse off the list.

But personally I like the static list slack has. I not only don't have things move out from under me but I always know where in the list to look for them.

Sorting by recent messages effectively makes them more-or-less randomly sorted every time I look at the list and I have to search to find things