Facebook chat no longer stays in "group"

[Dave Warren]

On 12/16/2011 4:35 PM, Erik Max Francis wrote:
> David Coulson wrote:
>> Yes, i noticed it with a few clients in the last week. Facebook uses 
>> XMPP so they can group users however they want server-side.
>
> I've encountered this as well.  I believe it's happening because of 
> Facebook's new "lists" feature, which allows people to group their 
> friends in lists.  (Though the actual change is fairly recent.)  In 
> the chat configuration tool, you tell Facebook Chat to only make you 
> available via chat to everyone, only those in a certain list, or 
> everyone _except_ those in a certain list.  If you choose the first or 
> third options, then the contacts that show up in your XMPP client (as 
> was said, this is not Pidgin-specific) will have the group name 
> "Facebook Friends" and unfortunately there's nothing you can do about 
> that.
>
> However, I think that if you choose the second method, the group name 
> may have the same name as the list you've chosen.  This requires you 
> to then have a list with the same name as the group you want in XMPP, 
> and also (and this is the problem) manually maintain the list of 
> people you want to chat with in a list.  So it's probably not worth it.
>
> In short, without manual intervention each time you add a new friend, 
> there's nothing you can do about the group name.
>

Whatever happened is new behaviour for Facebook; I've used Facebook's 
lists feature since I started on Facebook a couple years ago and until 
recently contacts always showed up in groups. It stopped while I was 
travelling, I haven't touched any privacy settings since then, and I've 
always been unavailable to Facebook chat with a certain group of people 
who don't use it responsibly right from when I first started using it.

I can't imagine why Facebook would have made this change, although it 
might be due to the fact that they're automatically creating lists and 
users might have whined that it creates "duplicates", but this is a 
total shot in the dark.

Either way, there's nothing pidgin can currently do about it. A possible 
implementation to handle this better might allow for locally overriding 
of groups, similar to how you can locally alias a user. However, I can't 
say that I'd use it myself, I'd rather have a consistent crappy 
interface when roaming between machines and clients than an inconsistent 
hack around the underlying problem.

-- 
Dave Warren, CEO
Hire A Hit Consulting Services
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren