Improving ICQ

[Etan Reisner]

On Wed, Jun 09, 2010 at 09:59:30AM -0700, Mark Doliner wrote:
<snip>
> > 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.
>
> To be fair, before I made that change people would occasionally
> complain that there was no way to block/ignore people on ICQ.
>
> --Mark

They certainly did, and (as they were almost certainly told) a plugin
could be made to do locally-enforced blocking and as I feel like I must
have said at the time I'd have much sooner added separate support for the
ICQ block lists to the prpl and a way to manipulate them (even if it was a
separate Account action the way Ivan is proposing we handle the
invisibility lists since fixing core privacy support is a herculean task).

I realize this may seem like somewhat late-stage complaints and I'm sorry
I didn't send email about this when it first came through. My intent now
is not to attack anyone specifically but rather to point out that a large
part of the indicated confusion is directly caused by changes we made
which caused conflation of the privacy lists that wasn't there previously
and which further broke the learned behaviours of anyone who had figured

My main issue is with the change is that we broke things that had
previously worked and "fixed" an issue which had an easily doable
workaround all without providing a means to avoid that breakage and
without providing a "functionality reverting" workaround mechanism.  out
what was actually going on.

I'm uncertain what the correct path from here is in terms of how to most
usefully (and least disruptively) fix things but whatever the fix actually
it it more-or-less has to include support for both the block list and the
visible/invisible lists. Discussions about which should be in the privacy
menu and which should be somewhere else, etc. can come later.

    -Etan