Improving ICQ

[Etan Reisner]

On Mon, Jun 07, 2010 at 05:30:22AM +0600, Ivan Komarov wrote:
<snip>
> Right now, I'm figuring out how to make the ICQ privacy system fit
> into Pidgin. The problem is that the packets that in AIM would modify
> Permit/Deny lists, modify Visible/Invisible lists in ICQ instead (ICQ
> does have a Block list, but different packets are used to modify it).
> Hence, the users who are used to the privacy system used in ICQ are
> confused (see #10967, #10916).

The people in those tickets are confused/angry most specifically because
of a recent decision (which I did not like and argued against at the time,
though apparently not on the mailing list which was a mistake) which
caused pidgin to enforce message blocking for all entries in the deny list
despite the actual functionality that list has on the service (thus
breaking anyone who had been used to the fact that for ICQ we were
actually manipulating the visibility lists).

I'm glad people actually filed tickets about it because it came up a
number of times in #pidgin and I kept suggesting that someone file a
ticket about it (and planning to do so myself but never got around to it)
because I really think we broke things badly with that change.

The complaint that we do not support the "normal user" case is incorrect,
that case is handled by the user not being on either list. I fail to see
the need to have a visible list of every user not on one of the other
lists, as in your example screenshot below.

> I think that the privacy dialog for ICQ should modify the block list,
> not the invisible/visible lists. For those, I suggest we have a custom
> dialog (Accounts -> My ICQ Account -> Visibility) similar to what the
> official ICQ client has (http://i.imgur.com/5JCnh.png). I really like
> how it is designed.

That dialog is complicated but fine (keeping in mind my comments above).
You may want to take a look at how the Yahoo prpl exposes its visibility
settings via the blist entry right-click menu as well (for consistency if
nothing else).

<snip>

    -Etan