[Pidgin] #7389: Status when changing to Available

[Pidgin]

#7389: Status when changing to Available
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 Reporter:  alongfield     |        Owner:  lschiere    
     Type:  defect         |       Status:  closed      
Milestone:                 |    Component:  unclassified
  Version:  2.5.2          |   Resolution:  worksforme  
 Keywords:  status change  |  
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Comment(by deryni):

 Controversial is too strong a word, complicated and subjective are better.

 To explain a bit of history here, just for clarity's sake. When the status
 selector was first added it didn't save the message. Early on some people
 decided for their usages they thought it should, and it was changed to do
 so. After a short time using that a number of other people decided they
 didn't like it (as it didn't fit their usage of status messages) and it
 was removed. It stayed removed for a decently long time, but was brought
 up by various people here and there along the way.

 A little while ago, a long series of mailing list threads re-awoke in
 which this issue was finally actually boiled down to the real at-heart
 issue here. That issue is the one about how people perceive of and use the
 status message.

 The two main camps (there may be others, but they mostly are gradations of
 these two) are the people who use status messages related to the status
 type (and which tend to be time sensitive) and those who use them as a
 more general mood/status message (think Twitter or Facebook status).

 It became clear, during this latest round of discussions, that the people
 (who were likely growing in numbers) who wanted to use the status message
 as a mood were hard pressed to make pidgin behave the way they wanted to
 (involving copying and pasting the status text around each status change).
 Whereas the people who used status type tied messages had things largely
 Just Work. As I indicated in my last comment, the current mechanism was
 chosen because it greatly simplifies the usage pattern for the mood
 message users and only slightly inconveniences the status-tied message
 users. Which felt like general progress to us. (Especially given that
 saving message-less statuses is easy, though this brings up the other
 issue of getting to saved messages more than the most common/recent six,
 but of that another ticket.)

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Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/7389#comment:4>
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