[Pidgin] #3801: Change status for various accounts

[Pidgin]

#3801: Change status for various accounts
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  Reporter:  neok          |       Owner:  lschiere
      Type:  enhancement   |      Status:  closed  
  Priority:  minor         |   Milestone:          
 Component:  unclassified  |     Version:  2.2.2   
Resolution:  invalid       |    Keywords:  status  
   Pending:  0             |  
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Comment (by deryni):

 per-account status management in pidgin is basically non-existant that is
 the point I have been trying to get across this whole time, we
 intentionally attempted (as Sean put it) to "make the simple things easy
 and the complex things possible" where "possible" for your usage of
 "really quick one-click access to one-off on-the-fly per-account status
 setting" is left up to plugins (like mystatusbox).

 A "custom status" line which does what exactly? Lets you set a status type
 (without setting a message) for one account? Why would pidgin want to
 present a crippled (because you can't set a message just a type) per-
 account status interface just to have it? A *good* per-account status
 system is something that I think should exist, I however don't think most
 pidgin users care (a belief I think the fact that this virtually never
 comes up bears out) and I further don't think that the sort of good
 interface for this that could exist belongs being built in to pidgin. That
 is *all* I'm saying. No where am I defending our current dialog system as
 a good thing, in fact I have more than once indicated I think it could
 stand to be worked on, I just have also said that I don't have any ideas
 myself of how to do that. What I have been doing is suggesting that the
 ideas being presented here are not viable answers to the problems the
 current system has and are not viable as real solutions to the status
 setting "problem" in general.

 Do you really need to see a menu that is as tall as your screen to
 understand that it would be a nightmare to use? If you do I suggest you
 try enabling just a yahoo account and looking at the mess that the status
 selector becomes just with the stock yahoo statues, the cached/saved
 statuses, and the New/Saved items. Now pretend you also add 6 account
 items to that list. What about if you add 10? Or 12? See what I'm getting
 at?

 The accounts menu items are smaller than the status selector items, and
 are accessed much less frequently than the status selector. The original
 accounts menu listed all of the accounts in pidgin and not just the
 enabled ones but that was quickly seen to be overwhelming and unusable.
 The issue is not that large menus are inherently unusable rather it is
 that large menus you need to use *all the time* and which require you to
 mouse past many uninteresting items to get the handful you want are
 unusable.

 You brought up restoring statuses after a restart, not me. You said "BTW.
 All IM's restore their last status on startup - including any custom
 statuses set. That's all the vast majority of users want." and I responded
 to that, so you can't exactly turn around and claim that you think people
 don't want it now.

 The icons in the Accounts menu show you the status of the account, but no
 that isn't a good mechanism for showing you per-account status
 information. I have already explained why a row of icons is not something
 pidgin is going to accept and I can't think of any other way to do it. If
 you can please tell us. The fact that pidgin can't show you this
 information is, by the way, one of the other reasons I think that pidgin
 shouldn't get into the game of allowing for easy on-the-fly per-account
 status changes, because it quickly becomes impossible to keep track of.
 The saved/cached status exceptions are memorable because you can name
 them.

 The most trivial case is changing global status. pidgin handles that
 beautifully. The next most common (at least as far as I have ever seen in
 terms of requests from people) is W and X accounts in status A and Y and Z
 accounts in status B. pidgin handles that decently well (via the New...
 and Saved... dialogs) it even lets you save these arbitrarily complex
 setups with useful names such that you can recreate them with one click
 (or a couple more if you need to pull up the Saved... dialog). The next
 most common (and this is the one where pidgin by default is least useful,
 and the one you are talking about) is taking the existing status and
 applying a single exception to it. Despite this being the least friendly
 scenario for pidgin it handles this in a way that most people find
 acceptable (if requiring a lot of dialogs), and that is the New... item in
 the status selector (which let me remind you *fills in with the existing
 status* so you can apply just the one change you want and hit Use.

 I have asked you this before and you have failed to answer me each time,
 so here I try again. What other IM client allows you to set up arbitrarily
 complex sets of statuses (both types and messages) and allows you to
 *save* that setup for later use?

 And I would imagine that the users of other IM clients aren't clamoring
 for the status capabilities of pidgin either because the people who want
 it have started using pidgin or because (like you at the beginning of this
 ticket) didn't really understand what exactly the pidgin system was. (I'm
 only somewhat sure you understand it now.)

 Sean, I am not defending anything specific about what we are doing. I have
 more than once said I think our current dialogs need work. What I have
 been doing is attempting to explain that "adding a row of protocol icons
 to represent the accounts and giving them status menus for on-the-fly
 changes" is not a good idea given the pidgin status model and is not
 something we are interested in having in pidgin. But that a plugin could
 do this trivially (dmitriid has been repeatedly ignoring much of what I
 say and every time I have suggested a plugin could be written to give him
 exactly what he wants).

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/3801#comment:23>
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