See http://blog.desmottes.be/post/2012/06/15/New-Empathy-contact-list

Not sure why this was reported as a bug as this rather sounds like a support question. :)

I can call it a regression report :( I have about 300 contacts in the list, most of them don't have avatars. And there's no way to change appearance?

Indeed, the 'compat' view has not been re-implemented in the new roster. It MAY eventually come back at some point but it should be properly redesigned first.

Adding Allan in CC to check if he has any advice on this.

*** Bug 687351 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I'm not against adding an optional compact view to the buddy list, but I'd like to make sure that (a) it is really necessary and (b) we're not working around any fixable issues.

The design for the current list aimed to make the top of the list as useful as possible, so that people don't have to dig down. Looking at Empathy 3.6.1, my list isn't very useful by default though:

 * There are two offline contacts at the top of the list, including one that I've never had an IM conversation with before.
 * The rest of the list is sorted alphabetically. There are people that I regularly have conversations with, but I can't see them because they are buried further down the list.

Nikita: it would be interesting to hear about how you use the buddy list. Are your 300 contacts always online? How big is the subset of contacts that you regularly have conversations with? How do you find contacts in Empathy?

* I have about 100 contacts online
* There are about 10-15 conversations opened in chat window
* Usually I type to use search in contacts list, sometimes I scroll through the list to find someone - if I can't remember their nick, but visual memory helps out, i.e. I will remember if I look at the name.

After a while using new contacts list - I almost used to it. Now I can see the main reason, why I used "compact" view. The most of my contacts don't have avatars set and I see the same default picture (it's pretty big) all over my contacts list.

Most of my contacts *do* have avatars in my contact list, and I find that extremely annoying to look at as it looks very cluttered and it makes their first name appear on a different line than the last name because the avatar takes up way too much space. I can't find the people I want to talk to, considering I do not look for their picture, but for their name, when I try to find a contact (because their names do not change, but their avatars do!).

There should definitely be an option to at least change the size of the avatar (maybe a slider for non-discrete/continuous sizes?), but preferably in my use case to turn them off completely.

(In reply to comment #6)
> * I have about 100 contacts online
> * There are about 10-15 conversations opened in chat window
> * Usually I type to use search in contacts list, sometimes I scroll through the
> list to find someone - if I can't remember their nick, but visual memory helps
> out, i.e. I will remember if I look at the name.
> 
> After a while using new contacts list - I almost used to it. Now I can see the
> main reason, why I used "compact" view. The most of my contacts don't have
> avatars set and I see the same default picture (it's pretty big) all over my
> contacts list.

Sorry for the slow reply. This is all really useful information.

We have some plans to generate avatars for contacts that don't have them; that should help here. However, I can see why, in your case, a compact mode would be handy.

Canonical has this issue in launchpad also, with almost 100 people complaining about it... 

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/1071345

With the option to have so many different services represented in the contact list, (just adding google, or facebook could add hundreds of contacts) it seems amazing that so much screen real estate is taken up for each.

(In reply to comment #9)
> Canonical has this issue in launchpad also, with almost 100 people complaining
> about it... 

Canonical is also very welcome to provide a patch for it and upstream it here, if so many of its customers feel unhappy. Anybody interested can patch it.

(In reply to comment #10)
> (In reply to comment #9)
> > Canonical has this issue in launchpad also, with almost 100 people complaining
> > about it... 
> 
> Canonical is also very welcome to provide a patch for it and upstream it here,
> if so many of its customers feel unhappy. Anybody interested can patch it.

Seems like a relevant data point to me...

I'd be interested in exploring this problem (there might be a few ways to approach it). At the same time, the role of the contact list might well change if we are able to move forward with some of the plans we have for Empathy, and it might well make sense to see how that works out before adding extra options.

+André Klapper, 

I realise that anybody interested can provide a patch to change the behaviour... However, judging by some of the comments on the Canonical thread for this "bug", the code is no-longer present.  Seemingly deliberately removed in the way that many of the features of Nautilus have been removed, causing Linux Mint and possibly Ubuntu to fork that project.

I find it unlikely, if that is the case that it would be possible to submit a patch restoring a feature which was deliberately removed, and have it accepted.

If this is not the case I will certainly correct that mis-apprehension on the Launchpad, but it would hardly be out of character for Gnome recently.

Hi, I also was surprised to see the contact entries in the buddy list taking so much space when I recently upgraded from 3.4.x. to 3.8.x

BTW can bug 693488 be marked as a duplicate of this one?

This person has a couple patches to fix this:

http://vaab.blog.kal.fr/2013/04/04/fixing-empathy-in-ubuntu-12-10/

Sorting by status fixes the biggest problem by putting people who are available to talk at the top (although that patch doesn't seem to work entirely correctly), and resizing the avatars to 24px makes the contacts a reasonable size.

This is a very serious regression as it makes empathy essentially unusable for anyone with more than about 10 contacts. Please, someone fix this!

please add an option for reducing the hight of contact rows :( this seriously makes me want to uninstall empathy.

there are quite some bugs open for Empathy; is it still being developed?

Go to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=browse.html&product=empathy and click "Git repository (activity)" and judge for yourself...

I'm suffering from this bug. Wanted to use Empathy at Work since it has both SIP and XMPP, but hit this issue. The contact list is too big, each contact takes too much space, shows me status message under each contact which I dont need, and only sorted by name rather than an option to sort by status.
Unfortunately will revert to pidgin + linphone in this case :(

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