A blog about someones first time with a Linux desktop which mentions Pidgin

[Etan Reisner]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 08:59:43AM -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 8:48 AM, Mark Doliner <mark at kingant.net> wrote:
> >  I changed Screen Name to Username for error messages in the oscar protocol,
> >  but I didn't change anything in the core.  We should totally do it, though.
> >  I'll try to do that today.
>
> I think it'd be cool if there were no 'standard' name for it, but
> rather each prpl specified what fields it wants and what their names
> are and how to store them in accounts.xml. It'd make most sense to me
> for ICQ to ask for a UIN and AIM to ask for a Screen Name and MSN to
> ask for an E-mail address and XMPP to ask for a JID, but other people
> disagree with me.

I remain very much against intentionally breaking the uniformity we've
been working on improving here simply because we can't agree on a good way
to handle this (which I think we may actually have found, more on that in
a minute). Not only do I think keeping things consistent here is good for
the UI in general, but it means we can start consistently using that same
term in *other* places in pidgin without needing to resort to similar
protocol-specific hacks. Someone just recently (possibly in #2295)
commented that we already use a different term (Buddy Name) for a very
similar type of information (granted about a remote person) in the Add
Pounce dialog so we really could use a good standard for this sort of
reference.

As to the idea, Justin Williams (Jaywalker) submitted a patch to #2295 for
the per-protocol labels which there was some discussion about in
devel at c.p.i. The conclusion we have arrived at is that it would be best to
change 'Screen name' to 'Username' (largely because it is less tech-y and
as Eric Lippert explained so eloquently in
http://blogs.msdn.com/ptorr/archive/2004/01/19/60352.aspx#60731 users
don't want to have to understand what "tech the tech" means) and that we
should allow the protocols to supply some short explanatory text which
will appear in the username entry field by default (as seen on Web forms,
not as something that needs to be deleted).

How does that strike everyone?

    -Etan