Hi, as I see that you are redesigning some pieces of the interface I will copy you here some thoughts I sent to the Gossip people as most of my jabber friends still find it difficult to user a tipical Jabber client and maybe you can find them useful:

== My views on Groupchats and Chatrooms

I will try to summary my thoughts on a limited set of points:

-Groupchats (private and for personal transient use) should be completely
different from Chatrooms (public and stable).

# GROUPCHATS:

- Always started by one of these:
· Selecting a number of roster items and “Create groupchat”
· Right clicking on a roster group and “Create groupchat”
· Double clicking on an invitation to join a group chat

- I think that in groupchats no basic user should see ever the service
browser, chatroom JabberID or anything like that.

- If the user is creating a groupchat Gossip/PSI should try to find a
“Private chat” service on his own server a create a room with a random
name and invite the users to it.

- If no service is found (or detected) it should default to a well-known
big and stable server (and, even better, having the default or list of
defaults as a config option).

- There should also have the option to create a room the traditional way
(not so important) and showing the current GroupChat JabberID in case it
is needed (very important for compatibility).

# CHATROOMS:

- A simple starting window, with the rooms already opened on the
(detected) public chat service on the user’s server.

- Also useful a combo-box with some well-known server hosting public
chatrooms (jabber.org, amessage.info, ietf.xmpp.org, etc.).

- Also a button “Advanced…” for the Jabber Browser but if I can modify
the default chat servers with a config option it would maybe not be needed.

- (This is a personal idea in order to migrate people from IRC into
Jabber Chats) There should be the possibility to add a ChatRoom to the
roster and when the user is online start automatically his chats
session, waiting for him to join. But if someone send him a personal
message or his name is written in the chat then raise it as if it was an
incoming message.

Regards and sorry for the copy-pasting.

Miguel A. Arévalo