Facebook contact list oddness

[Michael Secord]

On 8/2/2013 9:54 AM Jimmie Mayfield <jimmie at sackheads.org> said unto 
support at pidgin.im:

>
> Hi.  Lately I've noticed many of my Facebook contacts often show up
> as numeric userids (ie. -12345678901234567 at chat.facebook.com).  From
> time to time, for a few moments, these numeric IDs get replaced
> by their correct human-readable names before changing back to numbers.
>
> Anyone else seeing this behavior?  Is there a way to mitigate from within
> Pidgin?  Simply setting the contact's alias from within Pidgin doesn't
> seem to "stick" (presumably since Pidgin uses the server-provided names
> to avoid potential conflicts).
>
> Thanks.
>
> JM
>
This is an issue with Facebook's actual service not a Pidgin issue. This 
has been plaguing a lot of people lately. I've even seen it switch from 
the userID to the actual name and back multiple times within a conversation.

Unfortunately I don't think that there's any way from within Pidgin to 
actually mitigate this issue. That alias is set by the server, thusly 
setting it in Pidgin doesn't retain as you're seeing.

-Michael