[Pidgin] #9046: Auto-away sets away message...

[Pidgin]

#9046: Auto-away sets away message...
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 Reporter:  Daemonax   |        Owner:  deryni      
     Type:  defect     |       Status:  new         
Milestone:             |    Component:  pidgin (gtk)
  Version:  2.5.5      |   Resolution:              
 Keywords:  Auto away  |  
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Comment(by gjmf):

 Hi, deryni,

 Thanks for the response.

 The crystal-clear message I've been getting from my clients' end-users is
 that any pre-set "Away" text is definitely in and of itself a problem.
 And, beyond that, it's a serious problem when that "Away" text persists
 after they're no longer away, such that the status is green but the text
 says "I'm not here right now".

 This counterintuitive behaviour keeps causing misunderstandings amongst
 the teams using Pidgin, and after the misunderstandings are cleared up
 (e.g. people learn to ignore the status text and look at the status color
 instead) then I get more push-back over my recommendation to switch to
 Pidgin (and Jabber/XMPP) away from the proprietary AIM client.  (Yep, I
 know the proprietary AIM client is awful.  But it's an awfulness that
 these people are used to.)   I then have to waste my time re-explaining
 why we switched, and why it's still worth it even when this kind of thing
 happens.   I can't bill for that time, my client feels that their time is
 being wasted, and Pidgin loses the opportunity to make its way on to the
 personal computers of each of these staff.  Nobody wins.

 Yep, I'm sure that these people *can* manually change the text.  They
 could also change any number of the rest of the 10,000 options available
 to them on their computers.  But they're overworked as it is, and they
 really don't want to spend their time trying to figure out the
 configuration on programs whose purpose they barely understand to begin
 with - the vast majority of these people are experts in other things
 besides computers - nor do their employers want to pay me or my staff to
 go to each computer and change the settings on each Windows login profile.


 So, to reiterate, the people using Pidgin in my world see any auto-set
 text as a problem, and auto-set text persisting when it shouldn't as a
 worse problem.


 With that said, *thank you* for your work on Pidgin.  It's great o have an
 open-source standards-compliant cross-platform IM client.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/9046#comment:18>
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