Allow user to hide gesture chat
planned
Tangent Enyo
Gesture chat spam in crowded areas is very disruptive and problematic for screen readers and translators. A simple toggle should be added to the viewer that filters chat instantiated by gestures from local chat.
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Lucifera Morningstar
I would like to see this cover any object/attachment chatting in local, as well, such as various "shoulder pets", some of which lately have been getting hooked up to AI and dumping slop blathering into local chat
Nyx Onyx
I believe I suggested this way back on the Jira ^^
Reading the comments, I'm thinking a way to go about it is perhaps to have preferences for length and rate of Gesture-initiated messages sent that one's viewer will display. Say, one could limit it to N characters over X lines, and no more than Z per minute, with the option to either hide the messages entirely or truncate them when they're too long / too many lines. This as a separate filter from chat filtering (that is in FS anyway, don't know about the SL Viewer).
Gwyneth Llewelyn
In general, I agree (and have upvoted this as well!), as I'm often in clubs/parties/leisure events, where we listen to music and enjoy chat on the public chat channel; few things can be more annoying than getting blocks and blocks of text swamping over the public chat — especially when it is
intended
to annoy.Claiming "intent to annoy", however, is a subjective experience, or else we'd simply flag that person for an abuse report ("disturbing the peace") and hope that a few well-placed warnings by some Linden staff member is enough.
Of course, in an ideal world, we'd just mute that person. End of problem. In practice, I understand that this can be quite hard to do in a very crowded and laggy environment (that's probably the reason why these 'chat abusers' feel 'safe' to do their abuse in such places).
I just have two comments:
1) Personally, I
do
have some 'legitimate' uses for so-called 'gesture chat'. In other words: when I type /me nods
, not only my avatar does
nod, but it also writes on local chat:Gwyneth Llewelyn *nods*
.This was what everybody would do back in the 'oughts, when animations were a new thing. I do have literally hundreds of such gestures, some even including sound (mostly, saying out loud — with sound — what I just typed in chat and what animation my avatar is showing).
There is a reason for all of that: not everybody is really paying attention at what your avatar is doing, but rather following the chat; or, conversely, nobody might be paying attention to
either
the text chat or
your avatar's animation, so a way to attract attention is best done in sound
.Gwyneth Llewelyn
2) There are, of course,
legitimate
uses for such gesture-initiated blocks of text chat — I would probably mention 'applause' as a good example, when the intention is to show appreciation to a live performer. And one might argue (I would be one!) that there are some
chat gestures, when placed in the middle of a conversation, that may
be pertinent — such as a humorous twist — not unlike how stickies are used in, say, Discord chat (or any other chat platform).The problem, as I see it, is the
abuse
— again, those who clearly
have the bad intention of annoying others continuously, and are perfectly indifferent to any complaints (usually even doubling down on their aggressive spam-iness). These are the ones we wish to 'hush down' automatically. Alas, the fine dividing line of what is spam/abuse, and what is just supposed to be a fun comment (even when it's not understood as such), is something that cannot be easily figured out — in other words, it's not as if we can add lines of code somewhere to distinguish the two cases. And, of course, context and perception are important to consider as well (think of cute comments written in Japanese which you can't understand but possibly assume to be spam).Gwyneth Llewelyn
That said, here is what I could suggest for now...
To "fight lag", which makes it difficult to find the culprit and mute their chat, one possibility could be to do it on the Web, specifically, on the page for our account. We already get there the list of friends who are currently online. We might get the list of residents who are around us in chat range, for instance, and get a new option when clicking on them, namely, "mute".
While not perfect, such a solution would be able to deal with very crowded events where nothing is easy to click on — not even on the list of nearby users.
Of course, on less-crowded areas, there is no need for anything else except a well-placed Mute — and you can do that already in several different ways... so long as the lag is not overwhelming.
Signal Linden
planned
Paige Addams
Great suggestion Tangent! This is an incredibly annoying reality and can make it very difficult when watching for something specific in local attempting to sift through all the local chat spam that is not stopped by the block in Firestorm. This block in Firestorm is very helpful and yes it can be tuned to be more/less restrictive, but it does not focus on simply annoying gestures and blocks the owner. This is sometimes a problem because while you want to stop local spam and from gestures in this case you don't want to block the owner because they might be a host for some event and gotten carried away. As a side note, since I left Microsoft years ago and use Linux I don't know if this Firestorm block for local spam exists in the LL viewer because they have not returned to supporting Linux, something I had asked for.
Arwyn Quandry
Yes, please. This would make clubs much more tolerable. Nothing drives me away from an otherwise nice DJ set faster than a host filling the chat with gesture spam.
Aser Corvinus
Omg yes