The AT Forums have a feature called buddy list where you can add forum members to it and see whether they are online or not by going to view private messages. However, I think that in order to realize the full benefits of having "buddies" and a "buddy list", there should be some method of indicating when buddies are on, without checking for private messages. Just as a bolded message appears telling us how many private messages we have received appears during the course of our normal forum & thread reading, a similar method of indicating that a buddy is online could appear. Now, for people with relatively short buddy lists one solution might be to simply change the message to "no new message(s) and no buddie(s) online", but for people with a larger buddy list, the same problem could be recreated: they would have to check a certain page to see if a specific buddy is online everytime they receive an indication that any buddy is online. What they really want to do is know which buddies are online. Perhaps by means of a checkboxable option in the customize page, a user could enable a portion of the page to display all buddies who are "on". Any ideas? Is the general idea clear or unclear?
*Alternative to changing the no new message(s) indicator: adding something to the blue status bar which tells you the forum you are in. The one I'm talking about is the one that right now says: "FORUMS > FORUM ISSUES". To the far right of this bar, there's a link to see "WHO'S ON". Perhaps a second link could be added which states "BUDDIES ON". However, this could recreate the problem as I mentioned earlier and it seems a more robust solution might exist.
*Alternative to changing the no new message(s) indicator: adding something to the blue status bar which tells you the forum you are in. The one I'm talking about is the one that right now says: "FORUMS > FORUM ISSUES". To the far right of this bar, there's a link to see "WHO'S ON". Perhaps a second link could be added which states "BUDDIES ON". However, this could recreate the problem as I mentioned earlier and it seems a more robust solution might exist.
has for ages. Its a subscriber feature here.
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