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The Mighty Buzzard writes:

It's a slow news day so far, so it's time to talk about user to user messaging. There are two main questions I see here that we need to answer as a community:

1. Do we even want user to user messaging?
2. Should we use the existing messaging system or fire up an xmpp server or what?

The first is pretty self-explanatory. I've heard arguments for both sides. Yeah, it's convenient but it could also cut down on comment participation if you can just message someone directly.

The second is a little more open. The pros for web-based messaging on the site are it will take almost zero work since we already have a system in place for sending messages. The cons include it could take up to five minutes for a message to be delivered (this can be tweaked but not really made instant) because we only process the message queue that often and not being able to use your instant messenger of choice. I know AJAX is likely to come up for this in particular but we'll be needing a proper AJAX dev before we go down that road.

For XMPP the cons include not being able to have spaces in names so we'd have to keep a mapping of usernames in the db and check that there are no nick collisions before allowing creation of that XMPP account. The pros being instant delivery plus you could use any XMPP-friendly instant messenger and do voice/video chat as well if you like.

I know we're going to get a lot of tangents going here but please do try to answer both questions as well.

takyon: How does IRC (which includes private messages) stack up against these options?

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