Use case for per-protocol icons

[Etan Reisner]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 11:37:20AM -0400, Josh Williams wrote:
> On 8/7/07, Luke Schierer <lschiere at pidgin.im> wrote:
> > Sure. Lets vote. However, to be eligible to vote, you must have donated
> > at least 10 hours not counting emailing or posting about this issue to
> > the project.
> >
> > The number of voters will be very small.  You won't be one of them.
> > That is why your opinion only matters if it is persuasive, while ours
> > matters inherently.
>
> That is exactly the attitude of this project that sickens me. You
> don't care about the _users_, only the developers.

No, we care about who contribute to the project and not random people who
feel a sense of entitlement simply because they have decided to use the
software we develop and distribute to the for free. Not to mention the
fact that you have stated your own intentions to be so intensely focused
on yourself and your own anger as to desire forking an entire set of
projects as part of your effort to create a separate libpurple UI is more
sickening than even the attitude you believe we have.

> IMHO, it wouldn't be a bad idea to put a poll on the website that's
> open to everyone (or perhaps only those with accounts so their vote is
> only counted once).

It would be a bad idea, because it would even if it received several
thousand results (which I don't know that it would) fail to be even a
measurable fraction of the pidgin user base. Not to mention that, as has
been shown in countless research studies, users are often absolutely the
*worst* at deciding what things they do and do not want and in what ways
they want them. Also, of course, is the fact that I would estimate that
something approximating 70-80% of the people who came to vote would never
be heard from again and as such would essentially be irrelevant.

As has been stated time and time again, we have always welcomed reasoned
discussion about this or any other pidgin feature, and have had such
discussions numerous times, virtually all of which have ended up with a
better product in the end. This specific discussion, in all of its varying
incarnations, has been plagued by a small set of incredibly vocal users
each of whom has stated the exact arguments as each other person has
(apparently without reading the previous discussions) and who have as a
group refused to even begin to consider our arguments or to think that
perhaps we have valid points at all. The vanishingly small number of
people who discussed this topic in useful ways have actually helped us
improve a number of places, solve a number of issues, and at least one has
actually contributed a patch to resurrect the feature. Had the original
people been as sane and calm as those couple this could quite possibly
already have been 'solved' in ways everyone could deal with.

	-Etan