Re: Disappointing take-up of Gather.Town

[Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 11:38:23PM -0400, John Levine wrote:
> In article <024001d66664$ebdc3b90$c394b2b0$@olddog.co.uk> you write:
> >But where is everybody? The number of people in the application seems to
> >range between 20 and 50. 
> >
> >Is the problem that Gather.Town makes you run all sorts of scripts that
> >might be a bit icky? Or are we all really just antisocial?
> 
> Gather.town seems to me to be a work in progress. The way it leaves
> the camera on even if the window isn't visible is clearly a bug (even
> if it was intentional.)

They have a configuration knob to enable the behavior you desire, IIUC.
(I think it's called the "busy" state, but haven't played around with it
much, in favor of manually muting my streams.)

> I think it would help to take a tip from jabber and other IM apps and
> provide people a way to provide hints about whether they want people
> to talk to them, and also particularly if the window isn't visible,
> if someone asks to talk, a way to pop up a request to which you can say
> yes or various kinds of no's.  This would make it a lot less painful to
> leave it active while you're doing other stuff.

Sure.  I've tried some ad hoc ways to indicate my status, and I think
others have tried different things.

> If we want to make virtual meetings more like real ones, when you
> leave a meetecho session it should dump you into the virtual hallway,
> not the agenda.

Quite so :)

-Ben