It’s been busy for us in the last few months. Not only was Firefox 3 released, but the software we’ve been using for Live Chat is now open source! We’re looking forward to being able to dig in and help make some of the improvements we’ve been waiting for. In the mean time, we’ve made some smaller changes that we hope improves the Live Chat experience for everyone.
Max chat lowered to 3 – 4 chats at once was still too hectic, so we’ve lowered it again to 3. As always feel free to take fewer if you need to. We’re working on hooking up UI for helpers to set their own max if they only want to take 1 or 2 at a time so that you don’t have to leave old chats open or keep rejecting incoming requests.
New Advanced queue – We’ve created a new Advanced Queue that users who have been waiting more than a certain amount of time will be transfered to. To start with, admins and room monitors will be members of the Advanced Queue, though anyone who is comfortable helping with any chat should also be in this queue. This will allow us to focus on monitoring and helping our support team, but we’ll also be able to jump in and pick up the oldest chats if the queue gets overwhelming.
New patch! Position in queue – To take advantage of the new Advanced Queue we needed a way to see which queue a chat was coming from. Thanks to zzxc, we killed two birds with one stone and now we can see what position someone is in the queue. Currently the server offers chats based on which chat was offerend to a helper last and not based on position in queue. When helping out, please take users with a position of 3 or lower. For now you have to keep hitting reject until you see someone with a low enough position. In the future we hope to fix the offer system so that it offers the chat with the lowest position by default.
Come see us in #sumodev if you’re interested in helping us make more improvments!
In other development news, zzxc and mzz have been working on a build of gajim that works with Fastpath. If you’d like to help test it (or even hack on it) please find zzxc on IRC and he’ll get you started.