How to add multiple messges into one Ping

[MaxRink]

Is it possible to add multiple messages into one ping?

The Message Syntax is like this:

(21:23:41) qq: BROADCAST
(21:23:41) qq: text 2
(21:23:41) qq: text 3

[amyreese]

This is technically possible, but most likely not going to happen. There are a few complications:

• how do you know ahead of time that you'll need/want to batch the first message with future messages
• how do you know when you've received enough messages to send a batch
• if you guess wrong above, how/when do you figure that out and send a notification for the "missed" message
• assuming this is all configurable, how do you actually configure this is a reasonable way that will work for more than one user

If someone can answer those questions and put together a reasonable pull request, I'll gladly review it.

[dgw]

My immediate thoughts:

• Add a (configurable, optional) slight delay to notification processing.
• Messages sent to the same context by the same nick as the one that triggered the delay start are added to the queue and the delay timer is reset.
• When the delay expires, flush the queue into a single notification.

The delay handles the first two conditions, and its expiration handles condition three. A batch_delay (or whatever it's called) variable handles condition four reasonably well.

The first message has to contain the desired highlight keyword, but that's probably reasonable for users to configure if they want this behavior.

Thoughts?

[amyreese]

I think the difficulty stems from the inability to do asynchronous work within ZNC. Eg, if you get one message that would normally generate a notification, and you defer it for later to wait for batching, you have no way of saying "in X seconds, send a notification if I haven't gotten a message since then".

The closest thing to that would be waiting for the next message to come in before sending a previously-deferred notification, but you have no idea when that next message will actually arrive. It could be 2 seconds, it could be 2 hours...

If the async story changes in ZNC, then I think this is something we can revisit. But until then, this is likely to cause more confusion than anything.