Multiple rooms per user

[aurbano]

Should we allow being in more than one room at once? maybe seeing them side by side vertically, maybe in tabs if on mobile?

The idea is that if we do language based for example, I may way to be on both english and spanish, to greet people and stuff (so maybe we should only make it for admins)

but really, why not allow people, lets say you're in a room with people you like, but they aren't talking much, you might still not want to leave it?

So maybe you "try" a new room, knowing that you can always go back to the previous one?
So if we did this we should preserve rooms you're in, and rooms we have in general in the db. Along with a brief history per room so they don't look empty. and if this is in the db we don't waste memory. We just delete old messages after we hit some limit (say 50 per room or something)

Then when people open it again, we show them the rooms they were in, but if everyone is offline in all, we default to a new one that has active people

[aurbano]

Or maybe if everyone if offline in a previous room you were in we don't show it, and only show it if we end up reopening (with more users in it or something)

definitely something to think a lot about, let's try framing it from the point of view of our definition of success (I'm going to add it to a wiki for now)

[jaicab]

This definitely makes sense! I would still focus our efforts on the one room experience until it's all stable, but we can internally MVP this by allowing it only to admins and all rooms so we can easily switch from the frontend, have indicators when someone comments, etc.

But here's a fun challenge: how do you identify each room? What are its attributes? We have number of people and the language (which the latter btw I need to add to designs, we can use emojis for now). I can only think of

• We have: Number of people in it, unique ID (I assume)
• We will have: Language (could be represented by emoji flag)
• We could have:
  • Selected state: what room are you in when you're chatting? This could go away if you haven't started talking in another room
  • Active chat happening (did 2 people message in the last 10s)
  • Cardinal numbering (first room you joined is number 1, second is number 2, if a room dies the ones after it move up a position)

The cardinal number (e.g. Room #1) could be the simple frontend selection reference.

But yeah more of a mission talk too! I guess it's a bit of a v2, the main mission is to be able to have a great experience without ever knowing there's multiple rooms, I think. So as long as we don't compromise that I think it's great, no?

Also for language (this might be for a different issue) we could default but allow the user to pick a country on "login". A wee dropdown with the active language rooms, defaulting to English if there are no other languages. Many international users have their devices set up in English (specially in bi or tri lingual countries like The Netherlands, Malaysia, etc) but would probably prefer this kind of close chat in their first language.

PS: Wiki is a good idea!