Skip to content

Many consecutive action messages can be hard to distinguish

Steps

  1. Open a quiet channel you're allowed to spam for testing
    • E.g. Freenode/#quassel-test
  2. Via another client, connect as another user with the same nick color as action messages
    • E.g. for Material Dark, the nick testcrc3 is blue
  3. Send several action messages from both nicks without any normal messages in between
    • A mix between your nick and other nicks helps with possible confusion

Outcome

With the Material Dark theme, you acquire a wall of mostly blue text which can be hard to distinguish, especially with blue light filters like Night Light or LineageOS' LiveDisplay.

Example screenshot of Quasseldroid showing action messages

Screenshot of Quasseldroid in #quassel-test showing various action messages sent back and forth, all varying shades of blue

Suggestions

General

  1. Sender colors in action messages sent from your nick should use the same nick color as normal messages
    • If not, perhaps Quassel desktop should be changed, too?

When separated nicknames is on, i.e. not classic IRC look

  1. More spacing for action messages so they don't clump together
  2. Consider a means to still show avatars and possibly real name

Additional

This one's up to use cases - if you don't use Quasseldroid in /me-heavy places, it's less likely to affect you.

For comparison, here's Quassel's desktop rendering of the messages. It's not great either, but (to me) it seems a little more distinguishable with at least having markers in the sender column for where messages begin - it sticks out, rather than Quasseldroid's hyphen indent, and it carries the color of the nickname.

Screenshot of Quassel desktop showing the same action messages as in Quasseldroid

Edited by Shane Synan