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Just noticed the patch fails to apply cleanly, that's only because panel_preferences_voice.xml has DOS style line endings.
This will need thorough testing to make sure it doesn't turn off the mic any time it's not supposed to. It's working fine for me so far, but I'm only one person, and not a big voice user
 The previous patch was being slightly too aggressive and muting the mic whenever any IM window was closed.
New patch ( The new patch is also rebased to the current trunk, as changes to the voice preferences panel had broken the previous patch. I'm not convinced moving between IM calls should mute the mic, personally I prefer it only muting on return to the spatial channel, which is what the patch now does.
I can see an argument for it when moving from a private call to a conference call, but in testing I found this just tends to lead to me talking for a while before realising no one can here me as the mic has muted. Actively moving from one call to another you should be aware that your mic is open, so it is much less likely to be an issue than passively ending a call and returning to spatial voice, which may happen without any user action if the other party ends the call. Just an update to say that V2 is working well.
The UI folks have decided that they'd rather make it much more obvious whether you're in public or private chat, than this behavioral change. Thanks for investigating, though!
Hi guys - Identifying this problem was very helpful. I believe at the core, the problem stems from having invisible modes. There is currently no easy, at-a-glance way to know if you are speaking privately or publicly.
I'm closing this patch in favor of an internal issue which makes "Private Voice" mode and "Public Voice" mode more easily distinguishable. Many thanks to you Aimee, and everyone who contributed. *edit* looks like Tofu beat me to it. That's not the same problem though, and is unlikely to solve this issue.
One of the main situations in which this happens is when someone ends a call and immediately gets up and walks away from their computer to do something else. The rest of the world then hears them eating their lunch / feeding the dog / having a private conversation with their wife, or whatever. Modal indication won't help with that. This is plain social conditioning from people being used to ending calls by hanging up the telephone, no UI indication (short of flashing the entire screen red) is going to change that, as their attention has already shifted away from the computer as soon as they hit the close button. It could even happen without your intervention at all, if you are in a voice call and the other party ends the call while you've stepped away from your computer, that's a major privacy issue. Agreed with Aimee: Indication of status is a COMPLETELY separate issue. The Example I gave was about ending the call and switching to another window. How is an indication in SL of my status meant to help when I'm not looking at SL?! The common case of "I'm done with voice chat, and doing something else now" seems like it wouldn't be helped at all by this proposed UI change.
Yeah, there's a problem with the UI, but I'd say the most glaring problem is that people have a big "End call" button that doesn't actually do what every other "End call" button on the planet does- End the use of the microphone! Maybe re-label it to "Return to public voice" or something that actually says what it does, if you want to keep the same behavior as there seems to be more than one person who thinks a tangentially-related UI change is not the same thing, I request that this issue be re-opened. (it seems this actually re-opened the issue right away, rather than just sending a request. Sorry!)
I think it'd be really helpful for someone to raise this issue on the sl-ux@ mailing list. This seems worth further discussion with a wider audience than is probably watching this issue.
OK, thanks Rob. I'll raise it on the list, and reopen again here so that people are able to come and vote if they so wish.
I agree with Aimee and Subversive, that UI indication alone is not a proper solution. UI indication isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't solve this particular problem by itself.
The main problem is that the current behavior is not what users expect, isn't consistent with the behavior of other voice apps, and honestly, doesn't make much sense. Imagine if the telephone in your office would, whenever you hung up after a call, turn on speakerphone and start sending the sound of whatever you were doing to everyone else in the office. That would be a problem! Yes, the designer of the phone could add a light that turns on when it's doing that, but you'd still have to remember to hit a button to turn off that "feature" every time you hung up. And how many people would want that behavior in the first place? I agree with Aimee, Subversive, and Jacek. The problem is not UI indication, the problem is exactly what this patch solves: that when you're in a private chat with someone and you end the call (or, incidentally, when there's network problems), you suddenly get booted back into public chat. It's surprising to the user, particularly because "end call" is pretty much another way of saying "I don't want to talk anymore," but the system makes you talk anyway. Indication won't fix the system behaving badly.
Howdy, just letting you know that after having pushed this change around some more, we're totally planning on taking it. Thanks.
Thanks for the great patch, Aimee.
Thanks everyone for the feature suggestion and the ongoing discussion which made this landable. Fixed in 1.23.4, released on 06/15/2009.
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New Feature
Resolved
Normal
"Turn voice off automatically when ending private chat / conference" option
Attached a patch to implement this, including a tick box on the voice preferences page in case anyone prefers the current behaviour.