response to http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/414

[Etan Reisner]

On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 09:18:09PM -0500, Neal Rapoport wrote:
> I think it'd be useful to know which protocol was used because:
> 1. When in a message, if the person signed off, MSN & Yahoo cache the
> message if you reply, but AIM doesn't so you don't know if they are
> going to get your message.
pidgin doesn't let you send the IM if the person is offline on a protocol
that we don't support offline messages for, so you can't even hit Send in
a conversation on a protocol that doesn't support it, try it and you'll
see.
Even if this had been the case and something you would need to know it
would only be a reason for the icons being in the conversation window and
not in the buddy list.
> 2. MSN doesn't say the total online time or away message when hovering,
> so you waste time hovering without getting info.
MSN would show you the 'personal message' if we supported that, but at the
moment pidgin does not. It would also show you as much of the away message
as it can in the buddy list entry itself so hovering would just be for the
parts of the message that wouldn't fit in the buddy list itself.
So this would basically boil down to wanting the protocol icons in the
buddy list so that you can know when hovering over a buddy would show you
the persons total online time, that doesn't even come close to resembling
a good reason, for a number of reasons not least of which is the fact that
that information is incredibly rarely useful and when it is useful taking
the two seconds to look for it isn't going to be a troubling burden.
> 3. If you can choose which protocol to IM someone, then you have
> different smiley choices.  I memorized the keyboard ones for AIM, but i
> keep getting text, because It sometimes is msn or yahoo.
pidgin now uses the same smiley icons locally on all the protocols so this
doesn't really apply to pidgin clients anymore, also smileys were always
up to the client to interpret so you never knew what your buddy was seeing
exactly. And again, this is at best an argument for having the information
available in the conversation window and not in the buddy list.
> Maybe create a directory of those images, and then people can upload
> image-sets of their choosing?
The ability to have per-protocol icons (of any kind) doesn't exist in the
code, there is no way to do it currently. Replacing the green circle with
any other single icon on the other hand is trivially easy via your gtkrc
files (as I have stated to numerous people numerous times).

We have more than once admitted that placing the protocol icons into the
conversation window can be useful for people and we are looking at ways of
bringing them back, that being said we are not bringing them back to the
buddy list because they serve no useful purpose there.

	-Etan