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> You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. I've actually had this problem with most, if not all, IM/chat systems I've had to use for serio

> You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. I've actually had this problem with most, if not all, IM/chat systems I've had to use for serious work. They have better UX design for indicating availability, but I can't think of one where it's consistently worked the way I expect it to. Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status; others have some mixture of caching/update issues and strange criteria for deciding whether a user is "active" or "present" such that the indicator isn't very reliable in practice.

bastawhiz 8y ago
> Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status That's not an issue with the tech, it's an issue with the people. I'm not shooting off messages with no idea of whether they'll arrive, I'm at least trusting the person's intended availability. If they're just being an ass and marking themselves as perpetually unavailable, that's an issue I'd take up with their manager. In my experience, modern systems like slack and discord (and even hipchat) work well enough with their availability indicators. Chat apps five years ago I would not trust as much.