[Pidgin] #5077: QQ message text and sender(Pidgin)'s nick all changed to: "(NULL)"

[Pidgin]

#5077: QQ message text and sender(Pidgin)'s nick all changed to: "(NULL)"
------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  Med               |        Owner:  seanegan       
     Type:  defect            |       Status:  closed         
Milestone:  2.4.1             |    Component:  winpidgin (gtk)
  Version:  2.4.0             |   Resolution:  fixed          
 Keywords:  NULL nick change  |  
------------------------------+---------------------------------------------

Comment(by ssb22):

 Please don't drop QQ support.  I'm legally blind, and Pidgin is the only
 way I can get onto the QQ network and talk to those of my Chinese friends
 who don't know how to switch networks.  Because of my disability, there is
 no way I can use Tencent's official client.  No other open-source approach
 works as well as Pidgin.  (Miranda IM keeps silently dropping messages
 and/or crashing.)  Yes Pidgin has its faults (there's this one, and there
 are problems getting "set your personal information" to work properly),
 but at least it gets the messages through, and that's very valuable.  It
 would be a real shame if QQ support were dropped over this.  Please don't
 cut my lifeline!

 I agree that something needs to be done to help people who can't google
 for this ticket and run a Python script.  If I had the skills to do it,
 I'd write a patch that checks for messages that say "(NULL)", and if it
 finds them then add the text "this might be due to bug 5077" with the
 link.  I did something similar in my language-practice program Gradint
 (which won't display Chinese characters properly on certain versions of
 Mac OS; I ended up putting in a hack that detects this situation and adds
 an explanatory message).  I'm sorry that I'm not in a position to be able
 to figure out how to do it for Pidgin.

 With all due respect for campaigners speaking up for people who need to be
 spoken up for, I fear that telling developers "either do it properly or
 don't do it at all" may make them think "why do we bother" and opt to drop
 it altogether.  That would be a shame, because at least Pidgin *is* useful
 to some people even though it doesn't work for everybody.  I wouldn't want
 my country's blind federation to shut down just because their white sticks
 are difficult to assemble.  Yes it would be nice if they could better
 inform people, but I beg to differ with the "or else drop it" part.

 If the developers are not in a position to help, then perhaps that website
 with lots of QQ users (the one that was suggesting doing the poll) could
 put up a page explaining the solution, to give it more publicity than this
 ticket.  It might even be possible to temporarily create a Pidgin
 "package" that includes the QQ patch, and offer it for download on that
 website.  Or at least it might be possible to create an "installer" for a
 modified QQ.dll (get one of those "self-extracting .exe" tools like 7-Zip
 or AlZip, and persuade it to always extract the file to the C:\Program
 Files\Pidgin\Plugins or whatever it was - sorry I'm not on Windows at the
 moment so I can't check) and write a nice explanation that you need to
 download and run this .exe file after installing or updating Pidgin.  I'm
 not very good at doing this kind of thing well; it needs someone who has
 experience in packaging things up so they "just work".

 Meanwhile, this ticket is the first hit on a Google search for "pidgin qq
 null", so at least people who can google will find it straight away.  Not
 perfect I know, but at least it's here, and please don't tell the
 developers to shut the whole thing down just because they can't make it
 even better.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/5077#comment:21>
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