About persistent .im
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Persistent.IM is a service for multi-user conferencing
within standard IM clients between the contacts of the different
instant messaging systems: AIM®/iChat, MSN®/Windows Live™
Messenger, Yahoo!®, ICQ®, Jabber®, Google Talk™ and MySpaceIM.
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How it works |
| The basic idea behind the service is the ability to take
part in interoperable persistent conferences with a standard IM
client, that can be used anywhere – on your PC, Mac or any mobile
device. The conference owner must set it up once on the web, and
then the conference runs without any additional software or web
services, it’s all just within your IM client. Each active
conference is represented by a special contact in your contact
list – a conference bot. During the conference all participants
send to and receive messages from this bot. All messages sent to
the bot, will be delivered to other conference participants. |
Usage |
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Log in / Create an account |
In order to create an account, please visit http://persistent.im
and fill the registration form.
In the IM
section please enter your account information (login and password)
of the services you usually use for instant messaging. After
entering the information for each service, please save it. This
information will be used later solely to import and save your
contact lists within the service. Saved contact lists will be used
to create a conference with your buddies in a few clicks, rather
than entering their IM identifiers manually each time.
After you fill out the registration form please confirm the
registration by pressing the ‘Register’
button.
You will receive an e-mail containing your username and your
password, to the address you have provided in the registration
form. Use this account information to login. Once you are logged
in, you can start the conference.
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| Note:
You can change your account information anytime by following the
“My
account” link at the top of the page. |
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Start the Conference |
To start the conference, please press “New
Conference” button and enter the Conference name and Subject in
the corresponding fields. Time to Live is the time the conference
will exist without active participants. After this period of
inactivity the conference will be terminated.
Select your IM account in the ‘Your
IM to Participants’ field. It will be used to represent you to the
other conference participants. If you use more than one IM
service, we recommend you to choose the account you most actively
use to chat with the selected contacts. If you set the value to
“None”, the conference will be run without you as an active
participant.
Push ‘Load
my Contacts’ button and then the service you want to import
contacts from.
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| Note:
While loading your contact list into persistent.im, your
standard IM client will be disconnected. You may get the message
that you are signed in to another computer. Just sign in again
on your computer after persistent.im finishes importing. |
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After the contact list is loaded please select the
desired participants and invite them to the conference by pushing
the ‘Invite’
button. You can remove previously invited participants by marking
them in the list and then pushing the ‘Remove’
button.
You can also add the contacts manually by specifying their IM
identifier and pushing the ‘Add’
button.
Then you can begin the conference by pushing the ‘Start’
button. All participants will receive the authorization request
from the conference bot. After they authorize the bot, the
conference will be ready to start. Conference bots can be
distinguished from other contacts by their screen names – they all
have some form of “persistent
im” as a part of screen name.
Once the conference has been started, an invitation message is
sent to all participants, including the conference owner (if the
he chooses to participate). The participants may join the
conference after sending “/join”
or “--join”
command to the conference bot. The conference will notify other
participants when someone joins or leaves the conference.
Conversation history is stored in persistent.im archive. It can be
viewed by the conference owner later on the conference page within
the service.
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Bot commands |
Conference bots understand a few simple commands. Each command
should be prefixed with “/” (slash) or “—“ (double minus).
Currently the following commands are supported:
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/join |
Join to the conference we’ve been invited to. |
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/exit or /quit |
Leave the current conference |
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/list |
List conference participants |
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/list status |
the same, with presence statuses |
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/list active |
list only active participants |
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/invite <service id> <IM id> |
Invite a new participant with specified IM ID. Example:
/invite MSN bill.gates@hotmail.com |
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/history |
Show conference history |
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/history 5 hours |
Show history for past 5 hours |
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/history 2 days |
Show history for past 2 days |
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/pause |
Stop receiving conference messages |
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/resume |
Resume receiving conference messages |
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/help |
Shows a brief description of supported commands |
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