Online Status Revisited

[Jeff]

Tony's OSI project was an excellent solution in it's day, but interest has waned while the need persists. There are lots of forums that would love to include online status indicators in their forums.

I'd like to get some feedback. Would it be nice to have status indicators instead of just IM icons next to your post? Would you be interested in helping develop a solution?

[williamlee]

correct me if I am wrong Jeff but your talking about these little indictors that light up when your messenger is online and perhaps when we are here on the BBB site.
If so, I think that is a great idea and I can see how it will also help the newbies when they read your post they can see if your still around if they need more of our help.
I do not know how much I can help in the development of the solution, but I can see the possibilities.

[Jeff]

Actually William, I was referring to the IM icons that appear on the right hand side, just above your post:



All of these images with the exception of the Skype image are static. The Skype image will show my actual online status (on Skype now or not). What I'm proposing is to develop similar functionality for the other icons -- actually showing if a member is signed into one or more of the services.

The icon you're referring to () shows whether a member is currently logged in here at BigBlueBall, and has nothing to do with their IM status. The staff is currently looking at swapping out that icon to something a little more obvious.

[williamlee]

sounds great to me.

[princeG]

Something like my signature's msn icon?
I'm interested in proceeding with this idea, though in my case I wouldnt use more icons than the msn and maybe Google Talk.

[David]

I'd be interested in helping develop a solution.

[Jeff]

Yeah George, like your MSN icon (which is powered by a server running Tony's old OSI program). I'm hoping this can be done without requiring a special server. I know that there is code for AIM, ICQ, Yahoo and Skype -- MSN is a question mark as is Google Talk. I'll dig up what I've got this weekend and post it in here.

Dave --- right on! This could be a nice little project, especially if it can be packaged into some mods for the various forums.

[BandonRandon]

hello,

I am a webmater who currently uses tonys OSI however I occasionally have issues with it so i started looking for other solutions i found both aim's and yahoo's here are some links:

Yahoo: http://messenger.yahoo.com/messenger/help/online.html
AIM: http://www.aim.com/presence/main.adp AIM dose something wierd here however they require a key for this function to work properly.
ICQ: http://www.icq.com/features/web/indicator.html

Googletalk would probally be a possibilty if someone was willing to work the the creators of google. MSN would probally be the most difficult as microsoft has yet agian changed there protacall since tony's last release of OSI.

I also think it may be cool to have a (can i say it) Myspace online status indicator as they have on myspace.com.

Just my thoughts,
BandonRandon

[Spike]

I'd be interested in helping, as well. Maybe we coud develop a website independant or related to BBB and feature the OSI's there?

[Jeff]

Another website? Egads!

I'm going to start posting the online presence links that will be helpful. If you have some to share, please post a reply.

• AIM/iChat Presence Services
• ICQ online status
• Yahoo Presence
• Google Talk/Jabber online status
• MSN/WLM? Maybe duphus can offer some advice? Here's some technical data on the protocol.

For AIM, this code may work, but only if the user's privacy is set to "allow all users to contact me":

<img src="http://big.oscar.aol.com/Your_Aim_Name?on_url=Location_Of_Your_Online_Image&off_url=Location_Of_Your_Offline_Image" border = 0 >

The trick to making this work is finding a way to 1. display online status of any username, knowing only the username and without requiring any special setup or key; and 2) we MUST be able to supply our own version of the graphics, otherwise they'll look crappy.

I'me very happy with our little IM icons, and it would be easy to modify them to incorporate other conditions. At them minimum, we should support online/offline, but ideally we would include busy and away.