Problem:
I'm using Empathy for Facebook/Google chat and sometimes I leave my PC running overnight, which turns on the screensaver. I have autoaway enabled, and this sets my status to away, as it should, but unfortunately as I understand it Facebook has limited XMPP support, and still shows as online. I've done some searching and I'm not the only person who has this problem. I know that the current setup works for most people, which is why I'm proposing a configuration setting to make the change opt-in. I'd prefer to just have my status change to offline when I am idle.

Proposed Solution:
I did some browsing through the code, and it seems that autoaway and extended autoaway have a hardcoded status. Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I can tell on line 220, the away status is hardcoded to TP_CONNECTION_PRESENCE_TYPE_AWAY and on line 222 the extended away status is hardcoded to TP_CONNECTION_PRESENCE_TYPE_EXTENDED_AWAY. If these values were defined in the configuration settings (only exposed in dconf, not the GUI), this would at least give some recourse for people with Facebook issues. This won't affect anyone who doesn't want it, since the default values will remain the same.

I've never submitted a patch before, but I'm a fairly experienced programmer, and I'd be willing to figure out how to go about making the change if the developers don't want to spend their time.