Default room for Conpherence
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	SheerIce
	Jun 4 2015, 4:34 PM

Description

An option to set a default room when entering Conpherence instead of the most recently created room.

When you enter Conpherence you are automatically entered into the most recent room you've joined/created, which also hides the Join/Create Room buttons, a specific room is wanted as the generic default room for everyone. A smaller organization it would be beneficial to have a default or generic room to enter upon by default without having a predefined link in order to access it. A global wide option could be available to set a room as the default room when entering the Conpherence application, additionally this would be nice to be overridden by a user defined option.

Changes

Add an option for a server wide value for what room to be set as the Default Room (if any)
Add an option for a user specific value for what room to be set as the Default Room when they enter Conpherence

Bonus

Provide a way to Create or Join Room's while also joined in another Room.

Related Objects

Mentioned Here: T7589: Decide on pinning, sorting, and notification behaviors in icon switcher
T4103: Implement "Role Profiles" to provide search, homepage and application defaults

Event Timeline

SheerIce created this task.Jun 4 2015, 4:34 PM

SheerIce raised the priority of this task from to Wishlist.

SheerIce updated the task description. (Show Details)

SheerIce added a project: Conpherence.

SheerIce added a subscriber: SheerIce.

Can you please describe the problem you are facing?

https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabcontrib/article/feature_requests/#describe-problems

Updated.

SheerIce updated the task description. (Show Details)Jun 4 2015, 8:15 PM

We ask people to describe problems for a reason. People will gloss over the issue and go right for the feature they want added. In Phabricator, we have a high distrust of adding configuration options (they add complexity and technical debt), so that path is not going to likely happen. If the product, usability-wise, is broken, we'd want to fix that.

Understood. Is it an issue that a user does not have an interface control (buttons) to Create or Join Room's when they're already in one?

T4103 for example is a system that builds role default for organizations. So say, designers would be added automatically to a design room.

If you've already joined a room, I beleive we hide create buttons to reduce likelihood of room overload.

Does your organization need to create rooms frequently? I'm not generally opposed to improving room creation workflows though @btrahan might also have thoughts.

T7589 is a task for "pinning" Conpherences, too, which let's people just mark favorites.

I see your point in preventing room overload, too many rooms would make it a cluster of too many options.

We just started using Phabricator, though I don't see why there couldnt be a Room that's public for each Deptartment or individually for each of their projects that may be openly discussed or a room that's intended for planning events outside of other rooms. For example I'm in our IT Dept but also of Engineering Dept. which may have two separate rooms. Additionally there could be a company wide "General" Room. With the current behavior having those options is not available where using Slack would be more preferable which can have multiple rooms that's open to being joined by others at any time.

Hey SheerIce -

@chad mentioned T4103 - this is where we would add things like "every new engineer should be in chat room x, y, and z automagically". I believe this covers the problems you're facing, mostly. :D (Note T4103 will have a nice "reference" to this task so we'll be able to re-visit this context you've provided as we build out T4103.)

In T8421#118561, @SheerIce wrote:

We just started using Phabricator, though I don't see why there couldnt be a Room that's public for each Deptartment or individually for each of their projects that may be openly discussed or a room that's intended for planning events outside of other rooms. For example I'm in our IT Dept but also of Engineering Dept. which may have two separate rooms. Additionally there could be a company wide "General" Room. With the current behavior having those options is not available where using Slack would be more preferable which can have multiple rooms that's open to being joined by others at any time.

This is already possible via the application today.

Conpherence → Search → Create Room

The search page lets you search for any / all rooms you have access to and join them. Once you join them, they show up in your recent rooms.
The create room UI lets you set arbitrary policy.

I think having "create room" hidden behind "search for room" is very reasonable in terms of adding a hint of friction to room creation. That said, I think we could debate indefinitely if the friction here is a problem or part of a solution. For now, I'd like to get more usage that thinks there's too much friction on room creation before I reduce it.

As you get up to speed with Phabricator (and probably all the time if you end up using it), I think you might want to check out Phabricator on irc.freenode.org and chat with other Phabricator users. Its a great resource to ask about how people are using the applications and what not.