Date of the day being displayed, even when no conversation occured

On the chat, we seem to be getting multiple lines displaying the date of the days, even when no conversation occurred. That shouldn't be the case. The date should only be displayed in a conversation has occurred on that day.

changed milestone to %v0.5

By Alexandre on 2019-10-27T09:01:59 (imported from GitLab project)

The date should only be displayed in a conversation has occurred on that day.

I am not sure I agree with you. The date boundary border line is generated by any chat stanza when the date crosses a date boundary into a new day. This can happen with chat messages and status events like yyy is typing or xxx leaves groupchat.

I am not sure you can get this to be the default behaviour in Converse and most others like me will object. We might need to implement this in a sib-chat plugin.

Hmmmm... those are technical XMPP arguments I think. What I am exposing is a behaviour that makes no sense to the end user. That's not by chance that no other chat on the market has this behaviour: not Slack, not Whatsapp, not RocketChat, not Messenger, not Telegram, not Signal: none :-)

I understand there is a technical challenge in XMPP to hide those dates, but I do not think we should take UX decisions based on XMPP technical challenges, otherwise... well you end up with something like Gajim which sucks for the end user.

How can we move forward here? What can be the next steps? Call needed?

To me the spec is very clear: if no message posted on a given day, then no date displayed.

I'd be very surprised that @jcbrand doesn't want to go in that direction for Converse actually. Again for the end user having the dates stacked up like that makes no sense. It just bloats the interface with ugly and useless information for her.

Let me know :)

By Alexandre on 2019-10-28T08:39:02 (imported from GitLab project)

I understand there is a technical challenge in XMPP to hide those dates

As far as I can tell, if you retrieve chat history, Converse does NOT display boundary date borders when there are no chat messages or notifications. This is in line with behavior by Slack, Whatsapp, RocketChat, Messenger, Telegram, Signal: all :-)

However if SiB Chat is left open in a browser window all weekend and realtime messages are received. It will requires some complicated code to go back and remove the boundary border on Monday if no realtime messages or chat notifications were received for Sunday or Saturday. This looks is an exceptional case to me.

Can you confirm which case is happening here?

That's not by chance that no other chat on the market has this behaviour: not Slack, not Whatsapp, not RocketChat, not Messenger, not Telegram, not Signal: none :-)

For the record, some of them do not show day boundary borders in their UI and consequently do not have this problem to solve. This is a very important feature for business and corporate groupchat users

OK I got it now, thanks to you. Thank you ;)

From your screenshot, I see those lines:

This groupchat is not anonymous (A)
Dele Almighty has entered the groupchat (B)

We are hiding those. The UX of the project concluded they were confusing for the end user. But I understand that Converse still displays them under the hood, and so the date appears. That makes sense.

So indeed, a plugin is needed here as I assume Converse does want those messages to appear, otherwise you would have hidden them a long time ago :)

I don't know how you call those stanzas A and B. Maybe a spec for this plugin is : If stanza is of type A or B, do not display it. Maybe that would prevent the date from appearing?

By Alexandre on 2019-10-28T09:38:47 (imported from GitLab project)

Converse already has properties muc_show_join_leave_status and muc_show_join_leave that can be used to suppress the entry/exit status messages. Maybe the solution is to add a new property to suppress the other status messages like is not anonymous.

This will allow Converse to then hide the day border by default when there are no messages to display :-)

@dele: So cool to have someone onboard with time AND knowledge of Converse ecosystem. You rock!

I agree with your proposed solution. Whenever you're ready

By Alexandre on 2019-10-28T10:34:53 (imported from GitLab project)

I propose that we raise a PR on Converse to add a new setting muc_show_room_info to suppress the display of room info messages with a default value of false. For SiB Chat, the value should be true. If that is ok with you, I will proceed with that.

mentioned in issue #114 (closed)

By Alexandre on 2019-11-26T08:13:43 (imported from GitLab project)

I think they all do actually. Which one does not?

By Alexandre on 2019-11-26T08:17:50 (imported from GitLab project)

You are right and I was wrong. I just checked. Slack, Whatsapp, RocketChat, Messenger, Telegram all do.

unassigned @deleolajide

added 1 deleted label

changed time estimate to 2h

Converse issue raised for this at https://github.com/conversejs/converse.js/issues/1998

Codebase for Converse master (ver 7.x) has changed significantly enough that two fixes need to be done. One quick fix on the Converse 6.xx code and a more elaborate fix for Converse 7.0 later.

@deleolajide @jbpasquier I see on Community that indeed I don't have the date of the day anymore . But if we didn't have any messages in a circle for Monday, we have this display:

Is it linked or a totally different issue?

Same issue I suspect, but the info message date for 27th April was created before fix. Please confirm it happens after today.

Ok then I'm closing and will re-open if we see it in the future. Thanks @deleolajide !

@deleolajide I think it is working well in MUC, but not in one to one conversation. Is it possible that it clashes with the feature to jump to unread messages ?:

closed

removed 1 deleted label

reopened