[Pidgin] #6824: "Local alias" is confusing

[Pidgin]

#6824: "Local alias" is confusing
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 Reporter:  mpt     |        Owner:              
     Type:  defect  |       Status:  new         
Milestone:          |    Component:  pidgin (gtk)
  Version:  2.4.3   |   Resolution:              
 Keywords:          |  
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Comment(by deryni):

 The local alias is useful for a lot more than shortening excessively long
 names, but the usefulness of the feature really shouldn't be at issue. The
 issue is that the presentation of and label for the field is confusing to
 people who don't care about it.

 The field was recently moved to the User Options section to attempt to
 make it more obvious that it isn't one of the necessary account setup
 fields and to hopefully make people more comfortable with not knowing what
 it is and therefore ignoring it.

 I fully support moving the field to the Advanced tab to further drive home
 this point, I don't think even the people who use it routinely use it
 often enough for the extra mouse click to be a burden.

 Automatically eliding long names is problematic when multiple names share
 a common prefix. Deciding at what point to elide becomes important and
 unwieldy. It also only solves one of the issues that local aliases solve
 and should not be necessary to fix the local alias confusion problem,
 whether it should be done regardless of the alias issue is a different
 question.

 As a side note I like the "People you chat with won't see this name." hint
 idea, though if we move the field to the advanced tab I'm unsure how much
 it would continue to matter.

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Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/6824#comment:3>
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