Account editor

[Luke Schierer]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 12:43:18PM -0400, Etan Reisner wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 12:04:42PM -0400, Stu Tomlinson wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-07-31 at 11:42 -0400, Etan Reisner wrote:
> > > On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 01:16:18PM -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
> > > > This doesn't seem like a hard problem for a computer to solve; indeed
> > > > it seems exactly as if it were designed to be solved by computers,
> > > > rather than people.
> > > >
> > > > -s.
> > >
> > > I never indicated that the problems are hard just that I don't see the
> > > benefit we are trying to attain and that I recall the problems we had when
> > > we tried to guess at adding @hotmail.com to MSN addresses.
> >
> > What problems? We do currently append @hotmail.com to MSN addresses
> > entered without a domain portion. I don't know of any reported bugs or
> > problems with this.
> 
> Then I'm thinking of other issues, or issues that have long since been
> fixed. And unfortunately I don't recall the details, maybe Luke will.

I have only minimally followed this thread.  We started appending
@hotmail.com to msn addresses after several months of reports that msn
did not work that, on investigation, proved to result from people
entering in lschiere instead of lschiere at hotmail.com.  We figured that
someone using something else as a msn address would be more likely to
remember to enter it in than someone using a hotmail address.  So far,
that assumption appears to have proved accurate.   I can recall only one
instance in recent history where someone had a working account but could
not create a msn account in pidgin.  That case is an odd one in that I
am fairly sure the person's working account was/is in fact a yahoo
account that only worked with MSN live becuase of the yahoo<->msn
intetgration that we do not support.

The problem, as I see it, with XMPP is that it does not have an easy
default.  Once upon a time, the most common xmpp server was jabber.org
and we could guess with a high probability of success that an entry of
"lschiere" meant "lschiere at jabber.org."  Today that is not true.

This is, as I believe Etan stated, really an extention of the problem of
how to handle gmail and other highly popular xmpp servers.  If we made
each of them behave as a separate account type, the gmail account type
would naturally default to @gmail.com and the livejournal account type
would naturally default to @livejournal.com or whatever else is most
realistic there.  Short of that, we are forced into a situation where we
have to make a judgement call on whether or not gmail is more
significant than jabber.org, or pidgin.im or some other server.  Such a
decision is *necessarily* going to generate far more false possitives
than defaulting to @hotmail.com does for MSN.  

luke