[Pidgin] #562: case for old icons: Advantagous heuristics of differentiated protocol icons

[Pidgin]

#562: case for old icons: Advantagous heuristics of differentiated protocol icons
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  Reporter:  Ash           |       Owner:                
      Type:  defect        |      Status:  closed        
  Priority:  minor         |   Milestone:                
 Component:  pidgin (gtk)  |     Version:  2.0           
Resolution:  duplicate     |    Keywords:  icons protocol
   Pending:  0             |  
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Comment (by elb):

 In fact, the response to the "crit"[sic] of this has been anything but
 emotional; it has in fact been logical.  The "crit" has been emotional, as
 this post continues to be.

 For example, you state that the response to "Which protocols can be sent
 online/offline msgs." is that most people do not use multiple protocols:
 in fact, while this response may have been sent ''somewhere'', it is not
 the response we have generally been giving.  Most of the developers ''do''
 use multiple protocols, and we design specifically for this case.
 Assuming that I understand what you meant by that sentence fragment, what
 you want is for Pidgin to show you what protocol your buddies are using so
 that you can manually select a protocol which supports offline messaging
 in sending a message to an offline buddy.  This should, in fact, be
 handled entirely automatically by Pidgin; when you click on a contact
 which has no online buddies, it should automatically direct you to a
 protocol which can handle offline messaging.

 For your second point, you are overloading a data point with an
 essentially unrelated meaning; what if your buddy happened to have their
 work account and home account on the same protocol?  How would you solve
 the problem, then?  I suggest to you that whatever solution you would use
 (or like to use, if it is not currently possible) in that case is the
 better solution.  An immediate candidate would be to postpend (or prepend)
 the alias for these accounts with some sort of marker, like (H) or (W).
 If differentiation is ''very'' important for you, you might even want to
 put the buddy in two different contacts.

 In short, I think that ''this ticket'' is the emotional response, not our
 continued logical rebuttals.  I am yet to see a "problem" caused by being
 unable to see protocol icons which does not reduce to either 1) an
 interface bug which we should fix, or 2) fictitious.

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Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/562#comment:3>
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