Being able to post when viewing a room's live chat
Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2012 12:00 pm
SMO currently has a great feature where you can essentially see everything that is going on in a current room. It is really nice to see who is in a given room, what songs they have picked, and even how far they are in a given song if they are playing. There is only one thing I wish I could do when viewing a room, and that would be the ability to talk to users in the room through the live chat feed.
I feel that being able to do this would be beneficial to pretty much anyone who uses the room viewing portion of the site. As a player, it would be nice to send a few messages to a friend who is playing to let them know they are coming to play. It would also be a good way for players to ask about packs they should have before joining, because then they could download them quickly and not even have to restart StepMania. Also, if a more experienced SMO player notices someone in a room having issues figuring something out, they would be able to quickly give them a solution to their issues. Yes this can already be done through SM, but catching such an instance that way is a bit more difficult, and if you see it through the website, by the time you get SM started and SMO ready to go, you will most likely be far too late to help them out. Finally, having such a chat option would allow for quick moderation of certain situations when necessary. So if you see through the site that a user is doing something other users dislike, you could quickly tell them the rules or about courtesy of other players, or remove them from the room if they are intentionally trying to aggravate other players. Like the previous reason, this is possible through SM, but seeing this behavior through the website would mean you might not get there in time to do anything about it (especially if they are new, and might not know any better about certain things you want to inform them about).
Anyway, that is why I feel you should be able to post in the live chat feed. I'm not sure if this would be very difficult to pull off, but since SMO has no problem retrieving the posts themselves, I figured I'd ask about being able to send posts to the room through the SMO website.
I feel that being able to do this would be beneficial to pretty much anyone who uses the room viewing portion of the site. As a player, it would be nice to send a few messages to a friend who is playing to let them know they are coming to play. It would also be a good way for players to ask about packs they should have before joining, because then they could download them quickly and not even have to restart StepMania. Also, if a more experienced SMO player notices someone in a room having issues figuring something out, they would be able to quickly give them a solution to their issues. Yes this can already be done through SM, but catching such an instance that way is a bit more difficult, and if you see it through the website, by the time you get SM started and SMO ready to go, you will most likely be far too late to help them out. Finally, having such a chat option would allow for quick moderation of certain situations when necessary. So if you see through the site that a user is doing something other users dislike, you could quickly tell them the rules or about courtesy of other players, or remove them from the room if they are intentionally trying to aggravate other players. Like the previous reason, this is possible through SM, but seeing this behavior through the website would mean you might not get there in time to do anything about it (especially if they are new, and might not know any better about certain things you want to inform them about).
Anyway, that is why I feel you should be able to post in the live chat feed. I'm not sure if this would be very difficult to pull off, but since SMO has no problem retrieving the posts themselves, I figured I'd ask about being able to send posts to the room through the SMO website.
