[JDEV] Problems with auto reply

[Tijl Houtbeckers]

Hi Matthias,

Matthias Wimmer <m at tthias.net> wrote on 23-11-2002 12:33:04:
>
>I don't think marking a message as automatically generated is a hack.
>

The word hack comes to mind when I look at using "headline" for this ;)
Using some sort of tag would be a bit less of a hack. However, I don't 
think it's necessary. If a client wants to pollute the network with 
unnecessary messages (or presence) it can do this without implementing 
a very bad system for autoreplies! 

Why would *anyone* implement the system the way it is now? If you do 
testing with two of those *same* clients you can already see them 
flooding the network. The fact that they even have it in them can be 
considered as a serious bug! (worse then sending out a presence packet 
every second in my opinion). I hope they at least have a small time 
delay before sending out the autoreply! (though thankfully karma will 
slow them down a bit). 

>You don't always have a session. E.g. if you send a message to 
>"amessage.de" you get an auto reply that it has been forwarded to the 
>admin (me) ... how should amessage.de (the session manager of it) 
>determine if it is a new session or not ... you don't have a session 
>with amessage.de.

It could stop itself from sending any more of those confirmation 
messages on autoreplies of that user within the next 60 seconds or 
something (as I already suggested). The problem with using some kind of 
tag to flag that you don't want an autoreply is that some people (who 
don't like autoreplies) will send it out by default, wich will be 
reason for some client developers (who want their autoreply to send 
anyway) will ignore the tag, wich will bring us back to where we 
started. 

In my opinion a client wich has the behaviour that you describe should 
be considered as bugged, and should be fixed. (the same goes for the 
sessionmanager wich currently does this). 

Ofcourse in *all* cases a client should not send an autoreply to 
type="headline", only to normal and type="chat" messages. But that 
doesn't mean an autoreply *is* a "headline". Maybe there should be a 
type="autoreply", or if that's too drastic a tag marking that your 
message *is* an autoreply (not that you don't want one back). Clients 
won't send it out by default (wich they could decide to do if it was 
just some <x-noautoreply/> tag somewhere). This still doesn't mean they 
shouldn't use the common sense I described for sending out autoreplies. 


-- 
Tijl Houtbeckers
Java/J2ME/GPRS Software Engineer @ Splendo
The Netherlands