Pidgin usability look on the web

[Ankit Singla]

Richard Laager wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 13:52 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>   
>>>> Once I’d entered someone’s name, Pidgin would then unfailingly report
>>>> that “No logs were found”, because “Instant messages will only be
>>>> logged if the "Log all instant messages" preference is enabled”, and
>>>> that preference was disabled by default.
>>>>         
>>> The preference is disabled by default for privacy reasons.
>>>       
>> I can understand that that would make sense on an OS that encourages a
>> single user account, or at a kiosk or Internet cafe where many people
>> use the same computer without having individual accounts. But Ubuntu
>> both encourages individuals to have separate accounts, and (as of
>> Intrepid) will have a guest account that better caters for the kiosk case.
>>
>> Even so, Web browsers collect history by default, so it's surprising for
>> Pidgin to take the opposite approach.
>>     
>
> That history disappears after a while, whereas chat logs would not.
> Additionally, I think there's a very real privacy difference between the
> sites someone visits and their conversations. Comparing this to
> Evolution saving messages by default would be more appropriate. Do you
> know if it does? I guess it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
>
> Even if we don't change the default upstream, Ubuntu could trivially
> turn on logging by default in their default prefs. This would probably
> be a reasonable first step. If the Ubuntu users don't freak out about
> it, then perhaps we should do it upstream.
>
>   
>> And at the very, very least, the autocomplete menu could autocomplete
>> names from your buddy list regardless of whether they had logged
>> conversations yet, *but* disable the "OK" button for those who didn't,
>> offering an inline explanation above. That would at least save you two
>> clicks/keypresses in opening and closing the error alert.
>>     
>
> What if we did this and when opening the "View User Log" window,
> pre-filled it with the name of the current buddy (and highlighted it).
> Thus, it's just as easy to type new text as now, but you save some
> effort if you want the currently selected buddy. We could probably also
> special-case the "no logs at all" case. This should be relatively easy
> to implement, so we'd get some benefits now. A "Log Manager" could be
> implemented later.
>   
Without a full fledged log-manager, I'd much prefer this approach. As it 
is, I don't see a way of acting on a buddy that isn't selected/on your 
buddy list without using the Buddies menu, and this is what I primarily 
use the Buddies menu for: getting info/starting IMs with/getting logs 
for buddies without actually adding them to my list.
> Richard
>   
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