more OOC chat channels (non dev)

[Can-ned Food]

This is both a notification and an invitation for discussion.  I am not asking for any of these to be included in the game as is the gossip channel, so there's no need to bother the devs with any of this.

In my PlaneShift autoexec.xml file, I have these channels in addition to the gossip one:
/join alerts for rp
/join meta but no spoilers
/join meta

The purpose for the ‘alerts for rp’ should be obvious:  If one of my characters is in a certain location or doing a certain thing, then I can tell other players and maybe have them log on with an alt or decide “hey, maybe my character want to go there for some reason”.  Can also be used for spontaneous notifications like a tavern brawl or an impromptu public gathering somewhere.
Meant for when IC methods wouldn't get the word out well enough and when few players are online.

The ‘meta’ and ‘meta but no spoilers’ are for discussions about how the game is working and whether something needs improved or whether a player doesn't quite know how to accomplish something.
They are somewhat less formal than the Advisor system.  Probably not much need for them here.

[Dilihin]

While i appreciate the idea i think this will be confusing as best. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the system/community, the less bureucracry/complexity is needed. Meaning, at the current amount of players being quite small i wouldn't make tons of different channels for different purposes. I think the current gossip is far more than enough, since if there is spoilerish conversation you can always switch channels manually. Maybe later when we have a larger playerbase again we could use something like this, but currently we need unity not division.

Just my two cents, i apreciate and like the idea in general tho.

[Can-ned Food]

That's the thing, though:  this would be completely voluntary.  I'm only listing them here so as to inform people of a precedent — if they ever wanted to bud new and long-term channels, but would not, because they wouldn't know what names to use.

I was thinking that we might as well discuss names now rather than later, so that any concensus can be more firmly agreed come the time when there is too lot of chat in gossip.

I suspect that I don't understand what you meant by “switch channels manually”.  Unless somebody reconfigured their Chat tabs and message routing so that gossip uses its own tab, all the chat channels are directed to a single tab by default.  (Correction:  it is not possible to divert a particular channel in the ‘Chat’.)
As such, the only way to “switch” out of one is to /leave it.

Now, as for the scopes of the channels themselves:
What do you think about the names, though?  Ideally, they would be mneumonic and obvious, but should not collide with any names players could want to use for small, temporary channels — i.e. making a channel to discuss somebody's birthday celebration in-game.

Again, you are correct:  with few players online or not much activity, there is less concern with overflow or disrupting other conversations in fewer channels.

Thank you for sharing your tuppence.

[netforce10]

It's harder to track which channel something is said in/in which channel you need to say something, /1, /2, /3 can be easily mingled together.
With the current player count that may not be worth it.

However something which you made me consider that may be nice is a special "happenings", "activities" or something like that channel,
not to actually chat in but to create a channel in which to put automatic responses similar to a /who but from each player seperatly with what they are doing.

perhaps a simple explanation might be better.
Let's assume that we use /join activities to join the channel and it is assigned to /2, and that "/2 activities" is the command we agreed upon.

if player1 uses the command /2 activities then the following would happen:
[2: activities] player1: activities
[2: activities] player2: player2 is sitting on the ledge of the fountain reading a book.

This could be relatively easily achieved with a simple external program reading the log and activating a shortcut if the screen is active or notify player2 so he can manually use the shortcut if it isn't the active window. In a way it would be similar to the alerts for rp but work in a differn't way, and they could just aswel be combined actually. I'm not sure how much it would be used however.

[Can-ned Food]

Something like the 'finger' command in *NIXes and IRC, then?

That's an idea.
It would require some work building a way for it to only respond to prompts from certain people — e.g. those on your Buddy list.
Besides that, it would probably be best to do so via /tell, rather than the public chat.

Anyways, yes:  as of this time, the chat interface really doesn't facilitate having too many channels.
The advantage of separating channels would be allowing people to filter what they didn't want to see by issuing a /leave for it; however, the disadvantages to replying in the correct channel when you have joined more than one do indeed seem to counteract the advantages.

Maybe this one would need some coding to restructure the interface of the chat window, but I can't see an intuitive way to do so unless we added a second row of tabs inside the ‘Chat’ tab and beneath its row.