MultiWindowProtocol Plugin

[Etan Reisner]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 07:56:25AM -0800, Sergio Andres Rivera Polanco wrote:
> Hi all...
>
> In University we presented an "utopic" idea for creating a pidgin plugin in
> which we could allow people who have a yahoo account and a hotmail one to
> talk in the same window. Actually pidgin let us to add several accounts, but
> if I want to make a group conversation with some people that uses Yahoo
> Messenger, and another one that uses MSN Messenger, I can't do it...
>
> My question, (Or suggestion???) is that if there is any possibility of doing
> this with pdigin. If exists a plugin that do this I'm thinking, or if I have
> to create it. My knowledge about protocols and sending and receiving
> messages is poor, but isn't a problem, I only want to know if I can do this,
> how difficult it is, and which source codes may I read in order to
> understand a little bit more about pidgin's functionality..
>
> Cheers,
>
> Sergio

In order to do this pidgin would need to act as a bridging service, that
is pidgin would need to join the chat room on each protocol and reflect
messages from each protocol-specific chatroom to all of the other
protocol's chatrooms.

The drawback to this method is that the pidgin "user" entry in the
chatroom would appear to be saying all the cross-protocol messages and so
it would need to tag them with the original username (which would appear
something like '<timestamp> PidginUser: OriginalUser: message).

For the record this (the name tagging of messages all coming from the same
source) is exactly what MSN does with its official "named" chats (as
opposed to its default unnamed chats) with the obvious exception that they
aren't cross-protocol.

    -Etan