Please show the room timeout to room owners and moderators in chat

Question

Currently if you use the timeout feature in chat only regular users can see the timeout message and the count down timer. It would be nice if we could also show this to room owners and moderators. This way they know how much time is remaining in the timeout and they also have a big visual queue that the room is in a timeout.

Really all that is needed is adding the count down timer to the chat box section. Maybe put it where the avatar is but keep that chat box so they can still send messages.

We use the timeout in our room meetings to put a break between different topics and allow the users to come up with something to say during that time. It seems to work really well it is just a pain that we cannot see the count down timer.

Answer 1

In the 6 to 8 weeks it probably takes to implement you can use this user script:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Show Timeout in Chat for mods and RO's
// @namespace    http://stackoverflow.com/users/578411/rene
// @version      0.1
// @description  show a timeout message for RO's and mods
// @author       rene
// @match        *://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/*
// @match        *://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/*
// @match        *://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/rooms/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

    var MS = 10000, // 10 seconds
        cb=$('#chat-buttons'),
        todiv = $('<div></div>'),
        timer,
        room = /.+\/rooms\/(\d+)/.exec(window.location.href)[1];

    cb.append(todiv);
    todiv.hide();

    function giantS(num, text) {
        return num === 1 ? text : text + 's';
    }

    // poll ....
    timer = setInterval(function() {
          // post to events, we need one record
          $.post('/chats/' + room + '/events',
          {
               fkey:  $("input[name='fkey']").attr("value"),
               mode: 'Messages',
               since: 0,
               msgCount: 1
          },
          function (data) { 
             // yes, the root object either has a timeout property, or not
             if (data.timeout) {
                  todiv.text('Timeout ' + data.timeout + giantS(data.timeout,' second') + ' remaining');
                  todiv.show();
              } else {
                  todiv.hide();
              }
          });
      }, MS);
})();

The script polls the /events endpoint every 10 seconds to see if there is a timeout specified.

When the script is active in a room and a timeout is set this is what an RO, Mod or CM will see:

If you have TamperMonkey(Chrome) or GreaseMonkey(FF) installed you can easy install the script from the SOCVR Userscripts GitHub repository.