Status messages

[dchiquito]

It would be nice to have a way to publish some information about your current status. This way you can announce that you're afk or on vacation, be back soon or Tryin to make a change :-/. Slack has something similar: https://slack.com/help/articles/201864558-Set-your-Slack-status-and-availability

One way it could work:

• /setstatus [status] - push a new status out to the swarm
• /status [user[.id]] - get a user's status
• The status would be shown at the top of the chat history box when chatting with a user. It could also hypothetically be included somewhere in the user list in the desktop GUI, but I can't think of a good way that would also keep it suitably dense. Perhaps truncated, in smaller text, after the username, with a hover containing the full text?
• I'm not sure on the requirements for message types, but I'm guessing it should look something like this:

{
  timestamp: number,
  type: 'chat/status',
  content: {
    user: [user id],
    status: [the new status]
  }
}

• I see something in the code regarding "about" for a user, perhaps status should be included there as well.

[cblgh]

thanks for posting this @dchiquito! edited the post type above to read chat/status to prevent collision with the existing local-only (aka virtual messages) used to show e.g. date changes; they have type status

chat/<x> also conforms well with other chat type messages e.g. chat/text, chat/topic, chat/emote etc :~

[cblgh]

wdyt gang cc @hackergrrl @substack @nikolaiwarner @khubo?

the main »practical» use case we were talking about for this message type would be so that people could use it in combination with a future setting of turning off incoming PMs from randos. i.e. you could turn off incoming PMs and then set your status as /status incoming PMs is off due to high-load; let me know in a channel and i can pm u back