I'm not sure if this has been or is planning on being implemented, but perhaps some sort of indicator that a character is/isn't online, outside of the homepage. Suggestions include a green circle next to their name suggesting they are, yellow suggesting away/busy, and red or grey suggesting they're offline. Even just a simple Online/Offline quotation next to the character's name would be wonderful.
created: 21 July 16 at 11:43 AM (build: 7/1/2016 1:00 AM beta)
Your friends can see whether you've visited a page on the site in the last 15 minutes. If there's an online indicator, it should probably also be limited to friends.
Mostly, though, the idea is that any current online status doesn't actually matter too much here. This isn't a chat like IRC or something where it matters whether you're connected or not. The site preserves everything for me to see whether I'm here or not (within limitations e.g. the last 200 messages for chats), I can be messaged anytime, you can post to our roleplay anytime. Even if I'm not in a chat, myself, I'll be checking in on the site a few times a day from my phone. If you PM me or post in our roleplay, I'll get a notification and fifteen minutes later I'll get an email alert pinging me on my phone - so even if I'm by no measure actually "online", I'm only fifteen minutes away. So, really, all an indicator like this might do is discourage you from reaching out to me when I'm perfectly available and can be right there in a few minutes.
Plus, me showing up as online is no promise I'm actually here and available (I might've stepped out a couple of minutes ago, I might be idling in a chat while I'm asleep, I might not be interested in responding to PMs at the moment.)
Absolutely what Korra said.
This would be nice for those of us who do use the site like a chat.
But the site already tells you when friends are around. The only thing expanding that beyond friends does is enable stalking. If the suggestion is just "replace last fifteen minutes in the friend window to here now or not", that's one thing. Being able to see non-friends online status does way more damage than good (as Korra explains, there's not much good anyway).
"Within 15 minutes" is the part that I'm talking about. It's pretty simple, you let people set their town status, and decide whether or not they want to allow non friends to view it. There's no metric to say that it causes more harm then good other then pure conjecture.
But we're talking about "online" on the site, not in a room. People can only be online on the site as one character at any time, their active character. A general display of who's online right now isn't even functional, because all of a person's characters other than their active will show as offline.
As in, this would actually discourage message sending to people who are 'offline', and we can't be online to all our friends if we know them on different characters because we can only be one character at any one time.
In the same method however, it would encourage sending messages to those who are online. Some people prefer 'live' interaction over 'note' style interaction.
F-list handles friends differently, and lets you see friends as oniine if their account is on the site, not a specific character. That is indeed perhaps better, in fact I'm not sure what benefit there really is to having an active character on the site outside rooms. It lets you pick whose ad you'd like to display, but that could easily be a separate setting.
That's like a whole 'nother discussion though. The original request just sounds like someone pining for F-chat and trying to transplant that onto Lit, which runs on a wholly different system. What it misses is that on F-list, you don't have to go on the chat if you just want to hang around on the site and message people or edit profiles or look at others'. The suggestion as written here seeks to remove that privacy, and all for little that isn't already achieved by the LFRP button, which lets people who wanna be actively messaged advertise that yes, they are around.
Quen, that's what LFRP is for.
Letting a person decide to go 'online' or not, and letting them decide to make it 'friend only' or not don't remove privacy.
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