Suggestion: Re-Invite someone to Personal Conversation

[AtariAge]

Just ran into an interesting situation today with the Personal Messenger. I was having a long-running conversation with someone and they accidentally deleted the conversation on their end when using their phone. Unfortunately it seems there is no way to invite this individual back to the conversation, since they are already a part of it (says the forum!) even though they've deleted it on their end.

Matt, can you please modify this behavior so that it does allow people to be invited who have left the conversation? That would be spiffarific. :D

Thanks!

..Al

[.Ian]

We have had similar issues where people have deleted a PM by mistake (where 3 or more people are talking in a PM) and that 'removed' person can't rejoin.

I did raise this in the summer (think via a ticket), but didn't get too far :(

[AtariAge]

I just spent some time looking at the code for this in admin/applications/members/sources/classes/messaging/messengerFunctions.php, in particular the function addTopicParticipants(). In my particular case, the person who dropped out of the conversation happened to be mt_to_member_id, that is, the primary recipient of the conversation. The above function checks pretty early on if you are trying to invite either the topic starter or the main recipient and punts with error 'CANT_INVITE_RECIPIENT_EXIST' if that's the case.

This is a fairly complex function in terms of building the list of new participants and the database updates that are done. I'm not sure I want to screw around with it at this time as you'd need to update existing rows rather than the insert that's done now and you'd need to keep track of new participants and participants that have dropped out. That's actually not so bad. But since there is no confirmation about getting added to a conversation, you'd basically be adding someone back to a conversation who previously removed themselves from it.

I believe to do this properly you need some additional UI to allow the person being added back in to deny the request. There are two legitimate cases I can think of where you'd want to add someone back to a conversation:

- User accidentally deletes the conversation (which is what prompted me to start this thread). Conversation disappears from the user's Messenger and there's no way to get added back to the conversation.

- User removes himself from a conversation and the conversation participants want to add that person back at some point. Right now there is no way to do this. You'd basically need to start a new conversation.

In the first case, I think what would work well is to create a "Trash" folder that contains any deleted conversations in which new messages have not been composed since you deleted the conversation. You could then view the conversation, "Undelete" the conversation and be back in. Once new messages are posted, the conversation would disappear from your "Trash". This would allow someone who just mistakenly deleted a conversation to retrieve it. You'd need a note on this page stating that conversations are removed from the Trash permanently when new posts added to the conversation after you deleted it.

In the second case, you'd want the "Invite" mechanism to allow you to invite inactive participants. This could be done blind (as a normal invite would) in which case you simply add the person back in. But to do it properly you might want to give the invitee an option to approve/decline the invitation.

Implementing either of these cases is beyond the scope of what I personally want to do, given this is not something that comes up often. I have other projects I'd rather do that have more "bang for the buck". In this one case where the user accidentally deleted the conversation, I added him back by twiddling the appropriate bit in the database.

Still, it would be nice to see Invision evolve the messenger a bit further with enhancements such as this, as it does have a few rough edges.

..Al

[MageUK]

Maybe add some sort of checkbox above the leave link? Like "Never re-invite me to this conversation"? Unchecked by default of course, so the user would have to check that specifically to be blocked out. And leaving permanently accidentally on something like a phone would be difficult as they'd have to press 2 seperate areas.

[U2 Fan]

Gard damn! One of my members has just left a conversation by mistake and now he wants back in (and I want him back in, too!) but you're telling me there is no way around this?

[TCWT]

I agree.

[.Ian]

Gard damn! One of my members has just left a conversation by mistake and now he wants back in (and I want him back in, too!) but you're telling me there is no way around this?

sadly no - it still crops up from time to time for us.

[Robulosity2]

At the very least the warning when you Leave it should be more clear

"Are you sure you wish to leave this Conversation? You will be unable to re-join if you do"

[TCWT]

At the very least the warning when you Leave it should be more clear

"Are you sure you wish to leave this Conversation? You will be unable to re-join if you do"

Ditto! Or add another confirmation screen.

[AtariAge]

I forgot about this thread. :D

I'd still like to see a solution to this.

..Al