Last User Interaction in Presence

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Last User Interaction in Presence This specification defines a way to communicate time of last user interaction with her system using XMPP presence notifications. &LEGALNOTICE; 0319 Draft Standards Track Standards XMPP Core XMPP IM XEP-0082 XEP-0256 idle &tobias; 1.0 2015-04-02 XEP editor (mam)

Per a vote of the XMPP Council, advanced specification from Experimental to Draft.

0.2 2013-08-27 tobias

Fix issues raised in XMPP Council meeting.

0.1 2013-03-04 psa

Initial published version approved by the XMPP Council.

0.0.1 2013-02-17 tobias

Initial version.

This protocol describes a way to communicate a user's last interaction time with other XMPP entities over &PRESENCE; stanzas. For the purposes of this document, user interaction here refers to a human end user interacting with her device by means of a keyboard, mouse, touch screen, and so on. Based on this information XMPP clients can display the time a contact went idle or a duration for how long a contact has been idle, thereby allowing end users to estimate the expected responsiveness of their contacts.

This protocol uses absolute timestamps formatted according to &xep0082;, indicated as value of the 'since' attribute in the <idle/> element.

Experience has shown a number of issues with &xep0256;:

The use of relative durations is too vague. It requires additional information from &xep0203; to provide a reliable user experience.
Distinguishing between the idle and last online use cases is very difficult.
It is desirable to have idle time indiciated for &PRESENCE; <show/> values other than "away" and "xa".

Updating XEP-0256 directly would be problematic as it would break compatibility with existing implementations. Instead a new protocol is described for handling the idle time use case; the last online use case is handled by &xep0312;.

There are two main use cases for this extension, explained in more detail in the following sections.

After a user has not interacted with her device for some amount of time the user wants to inform her contacts about this fact. The client sends a &PRESENCE; stanza with time of last interaction.

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The amount of time the user has to be idle before a client sends this enhanced presence is application-specific; it is suggested that a sensible default interval of 5 minutes be used.

When a user comes back and uses her device again the client informs user's contacts by sending a normal presence stanza like shown in the following example, omiting the <idle/> element.

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      The protocol documented by this schema is defined in
      XEP-0319: http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0319.html
    
  

  
    
      
    
  


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Thanks to Florian Schmaus, Christian Schudt, and Lance Stout for their helpful comments.

The security considerations of XEP-0082 apply to this protocol.

This specification introduces no new security or privacy concerns. While including a last user interaction notation in &PRESENCE; updates can enable recipients to determine exactly when a user has stopped interacting with her XMPP client or even their system, this information is in essence already available if the user's client publishes timely presence updates.

This document requires no interaction with &IANA;.

The ®ISTRAR; shall add 'urn:xmpp:idle:1' to its registry at http://xmpp.org/registrar/namespaces.html.