Poll: what number comes at the beginning?

[jducoeur]

One of the most important concepts in CommYou's new integration with IM is the notion of a "thread slot" -- the number that is assigned to a particular thread of conversation. Since you are potentially juggling several conversations in a single IM window, you need an easy way to refer to a specific one.

At the moment, I'm allowing ten slots at any given time (which seems about as many as you can keep track of anyway). These are, of course, numbered 0 - 9. One of the first points made yesterday (by laurion) is that that's pretty geeky. Every computer science student knows that the number line starts with zero, but most other people in the world thinks it starts with one.

I suspect he's right, and am leaning towards simply slicing slot 0 away, so you get threads 1 - 9. But before I go changing the code, I figure I may as well do a quick survey of opinion among my admittedly-unrepresentative friends:
[Poll #1228967]

Comments

[jducoeur]

[...]

You are arguing like I do when I have already coded it, and love my code

No, really not -- I am more aware than anyone of the limitations here, and am not only willing but actively planning to evolve it quite aggressively. But you haven't played with it yet, and I really think you don't understand the environmental limitations I'm working with for this particular feature, nor the scope of what's going on. If I seem to be pushing back hard, it's because some of your suggestions flatly aren't possible; indeed, some don't even make sense in context. I think you're over-reaching in your recommendations, without actually knowing much about the system you're talking about.

Also, you seem to be treating this as the be-all and end-all of the system, which is far from the case. This is already just one piece of the puzzle: one particular mode of interacting with CommYou. It is, without a doubt, the most constrained and least powerful of the bunch -- however, it is also the one that has massive desktop penetration already, so I can't simply write it off. The commercial reality is that CommYou needs to be able to play with IM as best it can; the question is simply what the most appropriate compromises are within that environment.

The fact is, this thing is as far from locked-in as it can be. In the first two hours of it working, the active users came up with a dozen suggestions for changes that I've put into the near-term story list; indeed, several have been implemented in the 36 hours since it went live. But those come from actually *using* the thing. Without that, it's hard to understand the problem well enough to come up with consistently coherent suggestions for changes...

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

You're correct. I don't use it yet. Because you haven't convinced me to.