Compose and send notecard from profile window
Nyx Onyx
As there are a bunch of people / merchants who prefer getting notecards sent to them rather than being sent IM:s, for various reasons, I'd like to propose a button in the profile view that opens a notecard text editor that lets you immediately compose a message and then hit "send" (tick-boxes for perms would be great next to the send button), much like an e-mail. A copy of the notecard sent should probably be saved in the Notecards folder named with the receiver's name and date.
Instead of going to your inventory, create a notecard, edit it, set perms, and then drag it to the profile / IM window....
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Wulfie Reanimator
I'm thinking the focus is on the wrong problem.
Instead of improving the mechanics of "notecards as emails", we should probably be asking "why do merchants not want IMs?" Some reasons include:
- People think inventory offers bypass IM caps.
- People think inventory offers are more reliable than offline IMs.
- Merchants may use their everyday email for their SL account, which can cause "IMs to email" getting buried. (Organizing your emails is an art many people don't learn, especially if they rarely get offline IMs.)
- Merchants may log in (not ready to help a customer), see a customer query, and close the window or log off or crash, which makes finding that customer again an even bigger chore than writing a notecard. (You'd have to go outside of the viewer to check your computer's chat log directory and shift through unrelated people and groups.)
The proper solution would be to provide better tools for merchants, like a separation between IMs and customer queries. (The viewer already has some merchant-exclusive UI, like the Marketplace Listings to manage product updates.)
I can imagine a system where:
- Merchants (anyone who has Marketplace listings oropts-into the feature) have an extra button on the profile to "contact merchant" which would open a chat window (similar to IMs) where customers can send messages to the merchant.
- On the merchant's side, they would have a dedicated window (similar to Conversations) where they can see a complete list of anyone who's ever contacted them through the new button (perhaps by using separate local chat log files) and continue messaging the customer that way, even after relogging.
- The list of people the merchant would see doesn't include group chats or regular IMs, even if the same avatar has sent regular IMs in addition to the contact feature.