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

[Mark Doliner]

On Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:27:43 -0400, Etan Reisner wrote
> 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?

I can dig it.

What should we use to refer to the username of remote people?  "Buddy name" or
"Buddy's username"?

-Mark