At the moment Polari will not tell you much more except logging a debug message in the terminal, should you fail to connect to the IRC server.

There is not much actionable to be done from the UI, nor does it really indicate that anything is wrong. So for the last few weeks I have been working on improving the user experience when encountering errors.

My approach so far has been to use a combination of status indicators in the room list and display error notifications. Polari already has an in-app notification system, currently used for displaying Connecting to irc.gnome.org.

However, the notifications are not really actionable and could therefore easily be replaced by a status indicator. Connecting to a server is now indicated using the sidebar. Furthermore, the sidebar can indicate the status of connecting to each room, if joining one for example would take more than the usual three seconds. If an error is encountered on joining a server or a room, this can be displayed via the status indicator as well.

The in-app notification system has been revamped to displaying error notifications instead. If Polari for example is unable to connect to a server because the server address has been misspelled, an error notification is shown when you visit any rooms connected to that server.

From the error one can press the ‘edit account’ button to edit the account. In the dialog a detailed error will explain what might have gone wrong and the dialog will highlight the entry you need to edit as well.

Another case could be that you have been banned from a room. Here a ‘Retry’ button is provided so you can try connecting to the room once you’ve solved the problem.

Finally an error is provided when Polari is unable to establish a safe connection to the server. The user can choose to continue anyway with the awareness that the connection is public, or leave the connection as-is.

The error handling branch currently handles around 19 errors associated with joining rooms and connecting to servers. Hopefully the groundwork which this branch provides to have error notifications means that error-handling easily can be expanded in the future when future features land in telepathy or in Polari.

Polari 3.17.4 is around the corner. For this release, I have worked with Florian to get my work towards a better initial setup experience merged. As can be seen below the design has changed a bit too.

The primary change has been to move away from the installer (anti-)pattern and instead move fully towards a design inspired by the empty-app-states pattern.

In Polari 3.17.4 Florian also fixed a memory bug and a bug with direct messages not showing up until you press the notification in GNOME Shell.

In this digest I also want to briefly mention two more patches I have been working on which likely will land in later releases of Polari:

• SSL Encryption: When you create a new connection Polari will now try to determine if the server supports SSL and use it unless otherwise specified.
• Server Entry Validation: When adding a new connection, Polari will validate the server name and display a message if you use characters that are not valid in a server address.

Will I meet you at GUADEC this year? (:

Back in 1996 the World Wide Web Consortium made a draft specification for how you can link to an IRC chatroom. The draft does not seem to have developed further, but it is regardless possible to stumble upon these links around the internet now and then. Many other IRC clients support the handling the links too and this week I have enabled Polari to open them.

The links typically take on the following shape:
irc://[server]/[room]

If I wanted to link to the #polari chatroom, the link could look like so:
irc://irc.gnome.org/polari

Polari can open these links regardless of whether it is running or not. Furthermore, if you open a link to a server you haven’t used before, then Polari will ask you to specify a username to use for that connection.

The bug in question is bug Bug 728593. I am keeping a solution to solving it inside the wip/bastianilso/irc-url-parsing branch. However, there’s a few things I am considering before calling the work in this area done:

• It would be a good idea to show a notification if Polari is unable to parse the irc link.
• It might be worth to also support corner cases of the irc link specification such URLs targeting nicknames, URLs containing a passphrase and so on.
• It could be cool to have a “Copy link adress” menu item per room so you can copy/paste a room’s irc link to other people. The menu item could be placed in the room menu and/or in the right-click menu for each channel.
• It could be cool if we parsed mentions of rooms (fx #polari) in chats as IRC links you could click or copy/paste.

I’ll be off for a small trip the next four days but will return in the weekend for more polari bug fixing. (:

In heavily populated IRC channels such as #debian on Freenode, a lot of idle IRC users are joining and leaving every couple of seconds. At the moment, we display a status message for every user in the room which in some cases results in a lot of visual noise.
another busy day on #debian. 9 out of 17 messages in the chat view are status messages..

This problem is filed as bug 711542 in GNOME’s bug tracker. I have decided to try addressing this issue with some logic.

The main purpose of status messages is to indicate activity concerning a user, such as the user joining a channel, disconnecting or being renamed. The two primary use cases I see for displaying status messages in the chat view are:

• ..when a user on a channel is actively participating in a conversation, but then the user’s status suddenly changes. For anyone reading the conversation, it is interesting to know what has happened with the participating users as a change in their status can affect the conversation itself.
• ..when a channel is idle and no conversation is happening. In this case it is a convenience to display status messages. You might be waiting for someone particular to join the channel for example and thus is checking the channel occasionally to see if the person has joined the room. On the other hand, we also want to avoid flooding the chatView with status messages as it creates more unnecessary extra text to scroll through between conversations in log history.

To adress point one, I have implemented the concept of “active” users and “inactive” users. An active user is any user on the channel who has sent a message to the room within the last X* minutes. If the user is considered active, we allow any status messages related to this user to be displayed in the room.

Only recently active users emit status messages.

So because user Raazeer wrote “jelly, if I’m not back in ten minutes, I’ve destroyed my boot config and won’t be back today”, Polari will allow Raazeer’s status messages to be displayed the next X minutes. As can be seen in the screenshot above, a status message indicated that Raazeer disconnected shortly afterwards.

To address point 2, Polari will display status messages for any users provided there hasn’t been any conversation in the channel within the last X minutes. However, if more than 4 status messages are emitted while the channel is idling, Polari collapses the status messages and displays a single line summary instead. The summary can be expanded to reveal the details at any time.

Screenshot of a status summary in action. Clicking the “…” can be clicked to reveal the status messages.

With these changes I hope we’ll have less visual noise from status messages in Polari. Feel free to have try my current branch. With problems like these, I think the best way to find out if it’s solved, is by trying it over a longer period of time.

*duration to be discussed. It’s currently set to 5 minutes, which is unfortunate for Raazeer since he said he would return in 10 minutes. Maybe a good indication that I should use a higher number? d: