I’m working on a chat bot in my spare time (info coming… at some point), so I’m looking at implementing this feature which I had requested.
How would everyone feel about a message being posted in chat whenever you load Eterna? It won’t repeat if you’ve had a chat window active within the past 5 minutes (so it won’t repeat whenever you load a new chat page, only if you’ve actually been gone for a bit), and you can always turn it off if you don’t want to see it. The message would look something like this (minus the typos):
I know for me, as soon as I recognize a canned message delivery, I unconsciously filter it out and don’t really even see it any more. It becomes just another ad – an annoyance to live with. The regular notice about the next dev chat quickly became that for me. If Nando were to put something interesting in that message, I would likely never see it.
For something probably more aimed at newer users, does this seem to you to be more of an annoyance than the benefit you could get from it, even being able to turn it off?
As long as I can turn it off, I wouldn’t complain about it. But if I turn it off, my personal benefit is zero, which is less than the (very small) annoyance of turning it off.
I’m not really arguing against the idea, especially if you can figure out a better way to target new players (if that remains your target audience).
Agree with the “canned message” blindness. I do think this is something for new users to see for a while, but the only interest to me is when is the next Dev Chat.