Offline messages just became enabled on gateways. This means that now, you'll receive messages sent by patrons who message your gateways when your queues are offline. You'll get these messages the next time an operator assigned to that queue signs in. This is especially important for the SMS gateway, since patrons texting you may not know your status, and since texting is more asychronous-communications friendly.
If you'd like to test our our SMS gateway, please let us know. We can temporarily add our G1's phone number to one of your queues as a gateway so you can see it in action.
Offline messages are also enabled for IM gateways. Most IM patrons won't message you when you're offline since your presence is plainly obvious, but if they do, you can reply now. If they happen to have gone offline in the meantime, they'll get your message when they return online.
Offline messages are *not* turned on for widget chats. Past experience with widgets that provide offline messaging led us to this. Patrons that chat an offline widget will navigate away before you reply in nearly all cases, so there is no reliable way to reply back to them. They almost never leave contact information. Patrons viewing your offline widgets will see "Chat is offline" and so typically won't chat. If they try anyway, they'll get "Chat is offline" in response to their first message. And if you're using the presence API to hide your widget when it's offline, patrons typically won't see your offline widgets anyway.
Enjoy!
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A question from us here at Worthington Libraries -- is it possible to disable offline messages on gateways, now that it has been disabled?
Hi Kara,
It's actually not possible to disable offline messages.
But this might open a larger conversation: are receiving offline IM messages causing problems for your library? If so, we can investigate either disabling them for anything other than SMS.
It would be a lot more programming effort to have this be configurable, but we can certainly hear what folks thing about the offline messages.
Thanks for the quick answer, Pam!
I can't say that this is "causing problems" for us just yet, but I want to explore the options.
We treat IM as a "live" service, just like in-person and telephone reference. For after-hours contact, we already offer email reference. I’m just a little concerned that the offline IM experience is clunky for both patrons and library staff, especially compared to email.
I know that there would be considerable programming effort, but options are always nice! :)
Kara,
Thanks for the reply.
My expectation is that IM patrons really won't send offline messages very much if at all, since usual IM practice is that offline buddies don't even display in a buddy list. So, most patrons will only see you when you're online in the first place. On the other hand, the rare patron *may* have been sending offline messages previously without librarians knowing, since these messages just been getting dropped.
Just so we're clear -- offline messages are definitely not enabled on libraryh3lp widget chats. We know that enabling them there would cause a lot of problems because of the inability to get back in touch with the patron in nearly every case.
Got it. Thanks for the extra detail, Pam!
Yes, it is an advantage that we can now see who IM'd us after hours!
Is it any different from the patron's side? If someone IM's us when we're offline, do they get some kind of auto-response now?
Kara,
What patrons see if they IM you when you're offline varies by IM protocol. Some will give a special notification that you're offline and others won't; on some protocols whether or not you receive offline messages may even be configurable. Libraryh3lp can't do much about this, but for the patron, it will be standard for how their other contacts behave when offline. :)
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