[wishlist] Hide @replies directed to other people

[Ashley Kyd]

This is more a feature request/wishlist item. I'd love a way to hide @replies unless they're directed at me.

I'm following a number of people, and a small portion of them chat amongst themselves creating a significant amount of noise in my timeline. I'd like to follow their actual posts, but I'm not interested in their (often unintelligible) conversation.

I propose Gwibber hides @replies unless they're directed to (or mention) my account. I'm not sure how Gwibber 2.0 is going to do this, but it would be great to gets it out of the main timeline by relegating it to a separate tab or something.

[Ryan Paul (segphault)]

We could certainly add a preference for that kind of client-side filtering, but I doubt that it would be a popular. Would you want it to completely hide those messages or maybe it would be better to have them displayed in a "collapsed" form within the stream so that the user can click to expand them?

[Ashley Kyd (ashkyd)]

If @messages were linked together so they could be read cohesively, that would probably be okay. But at this point, a lot of the @conversations are between three or more people, somem of whom I'm not following anyway, so it becomes difficult to keep up.

I really only have a problem when referring to when 75% or more messages in the timeline are @reply conversations. When it gets to this stage, I think it would probably be better moving this kind of stuff into a different view.

I wish I had a screenshot to illustrate what I mean about the noise, but it's a relatively quiet time on Twitter as it's still early. :) Instead I mocked up two possible scenarios that might work.

[Ashley Kyd (ashkyd)]

Of course, it's totally up to you. I'm not sure if anyone else actually has this problem, and in that case it probably wouldn't make much sense to change things.

I've hacked my own Gwibber to hide @messages unless they're directed at my username, and that seems to be doing the trick for the moment. I'm no Python expert though, and I've introduced some nasty bugs. :P

[Ashley Kyd (ashkyd)]

Here's an example from this morning. One message, nine @replies I couldn't be bothering to read back over. :)

[Greg Grossmeier (greg.grossmeier)]

This is an issue on identi.ca but not twitter as twitter does not show you those messages unless you are also following that user. Many people on twitter get around this "limitation" by prefacing their replies with a "." to fool twitter, eg: ".@someone this is something I want more people to see"

Twitter's implementation is kind of a half-way approach that might be hard to implement client side.