As the active player list is going away (keep discussion of that topic here), the only reasonable ways to know who is online is to 1) use your buddy list and 2) watch 100.

There is a problem, though. Say you don't want to buddy every single person in every guild whom you call "friendly", but still want to be able to find/message those people in a furball situation. Without an active list to check who in what guild is online, I propose a new command be added: /guildmsg <guild> <message>.

This command would allow a player to message all online guildmembers of the guild they select. The message would appear as a personal message to the recipient(s). Of course, /guildmsg would not give any delivery feedback to the user (so that if no members of <guild> are online, the command invoker would not be told).

Edit:
An additional benefit of this command is that it allows players to communicate with non-buddied members of other guilds without announcing their presence on public chat. Some people like to fly under the radar.

A player can only /guildmsg a guild once every 15 seconds.

This would have the potential to become very annoying. It could potentially be used to selectively spam people. I guess I'd be okay with it as long as it could be turned off. In other words, have a toggle control to ignore all /guildmsg.

Spammers can be easily /ignored by individual players. But an option to ignore guildmsg's could easily be added if abuse were a problem.

Edit: would probably be best to limit these messages to once every 15 seconds. OP edited to reflect this.

The guild tab in communications lists who in the guild is on....

PaKettle... this would be used to message OTHER guilds, not your own guild. Moreover, there's already guild chat for messaging your own guild. What are you talking about?

I don't see the point.

Heh, yah, no one seems to.

Let me re-iterate, and if it still seems pointless, then I'll drop it.

I'm imagining something along the following scenario (let's not make this thread about the guilds listed in the example. it's just an example meant to illustrate the point of the suggestion):
VPR and CHRN are in a furball. VPR is outnumbered.
In this situation I would normally pull up the active list and see if any ONE, ITAN, TGFT, or PA members were online. If any were, I'd message them for help.
As the active list is about to disappear, and as I'd rather not buddy everyone in ONE, ITAN, TGFT and PA, I want there to be an efficient way for me to send a message to the members of these guilds.

Another example:
A Serco newb heard about ONE on 100, and wanted to inquire about recruitment. Instead of broadcasting to 100 their intent, they wanted to speak directly to any ONE members currently online. Normally someone would check the active list to find ONE members, now that is impossible. /guildmsg would help here for obvious reasons.

Yet another example:
A young trader wants to ask a TGFT member for trade advice, but doesn't know if any TGFT are online. He could use /guildmsg to find a TGFT member.

The list goes on...

Ok. /guildmessage is a good idea. I like that .

I would also like to see location removed from the buddy list .

I'd rather just buddy people that I'm 'buddies' with.

If a new feature was added, channels with fine grained controls would be infinitely more useful and powerful.

I'm with Maalik on this one, in that I think this would be better served by more controllable channels. If each guild had a channel, and the guild leadership could control who could access that channel, then the problem is solved. There are a lot more details on that idea, but it is deserving of a separate thread, and shouldn't derail this one.

This to me seems extremely easy to abuse. The ideal solution would require each guild to have control over who was able to message them, and that quickly turns into the channel idea. That direction seems much more profitable, as it kills this bird and many more alongside.

Maalik, diqrtvpe, sounds good to me. Less easily coded than my idea (probably)... but why don't you guys draw something up? I'd support it.

I have a plug in from a ways back i could modify for something similar to this. Though it would require somebody to for instance

/msg "look ...no hands" guildmsg [message here]

and then people would see in guild chat:

(guild) [Helios I-9] Look ...No Hands **Atice 'surrender pirates'**

I would have to be running the plug-in, or any other guildmember would, and it would have that player relay the messege and who its from over guild chat.

It's not as good as Atice's suggestion, but atleast it wouldn't require developer work.

As far as using the coms>guild thing to see who's online in your guild, the player guilds page already does that if the account you're logged into the website with has a character in the guild.

I think that "/msg irc active players" should return a list of all players who are online and have spoken on 100.

Ever, in the last month, day, hour, minute? How would FireMage's bot know who is actually online without the devs giving him information (which could happen, but it might be exploitable)?

that'd end up no different than the apl. I'd give it 10 maybe 15 minutes before somebody codes a bot for the irc channel to take the active players from that and post it to a web page.

That, too. I support Maalik's assessment.

improved inter-guild comms... ok +1

Why not just create a plugin that types on some given channel in a cipher, and automatically decodes that cipher, then you can distribute that plugin to anyone you want to listen. Or not.

Yeah Starpwn. But it would be nice if you didn't need a plugin..