GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 592595
Allow pinning contacts (showing them even when they are offline)
Last modified: 2011-08-29 10:12:43 UTC
It would be nice if contacts could be "pinned" to always appear, even if offline (similar to tomboy notes). Showing all offline buddies is generally not what I want (too many).
There is also a convention to have same property for groups: offline contacts in pinned groups are displayed.
There is a new feature in Empathy 2.32.0 that allows you to mark contacts as "favorites"; it could *almost* fix this bug, except that it lacks one crucial thing: it doesn't show the contacts regardless of their connection status (if your favorite contacts are offline, they don't show up)... ...which pretty much defeats the purpose of having them as favorites. I mean, what's the difference between a favorite and yet another "group" (that you'd call "Favorites" or "Uber cool" or whatever) if marking someone as a favorite doesn't mean that they get shown at all times?
*** Bug 614492 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This is a main lacking feature restricting my usage of Empathy. Showing all contacts when offline is excessive and far too spammy, whereas integrating that option with Favorites (and pinning groups) would completely solve this. At the least, a preferences option for "Show pinned contacts when offline" would be great. Though, if this is supported via favorites, in the spirit of minimizing redundancy, it might be best to only show the offline buddies in the "Favorites" group.
*** Bug 633576 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Created attachment 174240 [details] [review] http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/cassidy/empathy;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/show-favorite-592595 libempathy-gtk/empathy-individual-view.c | 5 ++++- 1 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
So the patch is fine. Though I wonder if this shouldn't be exposed as a preference: "Show favourite contacts even when they're offline" or something. Out of interest, if favouritism is stored by Folks, can we now strip it out of tp-logger, which is somewhere that it never really belonged.
(In reply to comment #7) > So the patch is fine. Though I wonder if this shouldn't be exposed as a > preference: "Show favourite contacts even when they're offline" or something. As Jean-François, then what's the difference betweem marking a contact as favorite and put it in a "1. My Favorite contact group" ? I'm not convinced it's worth an option tbh. > Out of interest, if favouritism is stored by Folks, can we now strip it out of > tp-logger, which is somewhere that it never really belonged. It's not, folks still use tp-logger to get/store favorites.
I really do not think we should have yet another option for this in the preferences. The whole point of the Favorites feature is to show contacts no matter their status; otherwise, this is not any different from simply creating a contact group that is named "Favorites" or "Cool kids". The preferences dialog is already quite cluttered as it is (bug #587019, I'm looking at you!).
I thought the point of "favorites" was to have contacts show up in a particular place, near the top of the contact list, so they're easy to find when they're online. Just because they're a "favorite" doesn't mean that I want them to always show up. That said, there are contacts I'd like to always show up even when offline, so "pinning" is still a useful idea to me.
Well if you need to quickly find them when they are online, I guess you could use the search-as-you-type feature. If pinning is implemented as a separate feature, I guess that's possible too; I just wouldn't see the point in having the Favorites feature (because, again, you could just have a "Favorites" group, or a group named "0000").
(In reply to comment #11) > If pinning is implemented as a separate feature, I guess that's possible too; I > just wouldn't see the point in having the Favorites feature (because, again, > you could just have a "Favorites" group, or a group named "0000"). I totally agree. If anything, the groups could be movable so that you can move the fav group to the top. This would be nice anyway because I don't really see the value of sorting groups alphabetically...
(In reply to comment #11) > Well if you need to quickly find them when they are online, I guess you could > use the search-as-you-type feature. Quicksearch searches offline contacts too. > If pinning is implemented as a separate feature, I guess that's possible too; I > just wouldn't see the point in having the Favorites feature (because, again, > you could just have a "Favorites" group, or a group named "0000"). FWIW not all protocols support contact groups.
*** Bug 638127 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
also reported here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/686190
I finally merged this patch to 2.34 and master. This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.