What happened to "Raise chat window on events"?

[Alan Donovan]

Hello Pidgin developers,

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
    What happened to "raise chat window on events"?
    And why is this information so hard to find?

I noticed that a recent version of Pidgin has stopped raising the chat
window when a new message arrives.  I find this new behaviour very
frustrating since new messages can stay buried for hours before I
discover them.

I've searched the web and the docs, and as far as I can tell, the
removal of this option was intentional, but I can't understand why, or
what I'm supposed to do instead.  I get the feeling my question might
be quite frequently asked, but I don't see it anywhere on the FAQ
page.

Some things I tried:

- https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gaim/+question/5285

  This page claims that the window manager is now responsible for this
  piece of configuration.  (This answer makes no sense to me, since
  you don't know what window manager I'm using.)

- http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/321

  This bug seems to describe exactly the same issue, but I couldn't
  follow the details, which seemed Windows-specific.

- I built the v2.6.6-devel code from the head of Monotone and found
  the same behaviour (and the "Raise chat window" option is still
  absent from the GUI), so it doesn't seem to be that I'm using an old
  release.  (I'm normally using v2.5.2 on Linux.)

- Looking at the source code, it appears that my missing option
  "/conversations/im/raise_on_events" has been renamed
  "/plugins/gtk/X11/notify/method_raise".  I'm not sure where to find
  this new option in the GUI, but I looked everywhere.  Various docs
  talk about a "notification plugin", but I can't believe I'd have to
  install some kind of plugin just to keep this simple, intuitive
  behaviour.

- I tried manually setting this option to "1" in the prefs.xml file,
  and restarting.  This didn't work.

Help much appreciated.

cheers
alan