The triumphant return of Auto-Accept!
(Skip straight to the bottom if you just want the plugin or patch and not the background).
I am an internet socialite, as most of you reading this probably know. Internet communication comes in many forms, from email to forums to Usenet. Some people live their life on the end of a telephone; I’m usually on the end of a message window, and have been for over ten years.
I grew up on IRC, which I still use. But the most gratifying, the easiest and the most rewarding type of communication is instant messaging, and always has been. Your friends, foes, associates, colleagues, family, acquaintances and partners are just there and then there are all the people who don’t know you, and all the people you don’t know who come knocking on your door at all hours… anyway.
The Problem
Without effective communication I feel like I’m wasting my time trying to get my point across. Without being accessible, I feel unreachable; like I’m trying to speak a foreign language. That’s why I’m on most of the messaging services out there: there’s always a friend who uses “the other one”. I started off using ICQ, off the back of Usenet, almost 10 years ago. Most of my UK friends are on MSN, and likely always will be, including my parents and sister. Most of my US friends are on AIM - drum’n'bass seems to revolve around AIM. Most of my european and Russian friends on ICQ. And then there are those odd few who stick by Yahoo messenger… anyway.
There’s only one way to keep in touch with them all: use all of them. But the programs vary wildly, some (*cough* ICQ) are buggy as hell, some (*cough* AIM) are very user unfriendly, or have limitations such as not being able to have more than 200 names on your buddy list. I have more than 200 listeners to my radio show, so that’s nowhere near enough. And you can’t open 2 copies of AIM without some serious messing about (although they have recently changed it so you can link screen names and avoid this problem). Most of them don’t even log properly.
The Program
Having 4 or 5 messengers open at once - all of which think they are gods gift to you - is a serious pain in the ass, not to mention a great way to make your computer crawl.
I thought my problems had been solved when Trillian came along: here’s a program that lets me add 5 AIM names, 2 ICQ names, 2 MSN names and my Yahoo name all at once and they all look and work the same! And happy I would stay for a while, but unfortunately Trillian is buggy: it’s VERY VERY slow with a buddy list the size of mine (over 1500 names).
Nobody is writing software to deal with my situation. I use my messenger like an address book, and it’s business oriented. Fortunately there is another option, one that isn’t slow, and crashes less: Gaim. Gaim does the same sort of thing as Trillian, and actually has a few features Trilly doesn’t (such as vertical tabbing!!! A god send during my radio show when I have 40 messages waiting!)
The Problem (again)
Gaim has one flaw that’s almost a show stopper for me: no auto-accept.
I am a DJ. DJs and musicians send each other music they’ve written - for promotion, for the web sites I run, for the radio show, for feedback, for playing in clubs. I rely on the music. I really, really want it. But with Gaim, if I’m not there to accept it, I simply won’t get a second chance. That was the one thing Trillian had going for it.
For the last few months, Gaim has actually had something that looks somewhat like an autoaccept plugin - but it’s not. All it does is let you pick specific people who you want to auto-accept from. As the unsigned artists sending me music are not usually on my buddy list, and they send me stuff at all hours of the day, that’s no good at all.
In fact, the Gaim developers seem almost bloody-mindedly stubborn over this issue. Apparently, auto-accept is a security risk. Not only do the developers think this, though, but everyone who’s ever read their mailing list appears to blindly regurgitate this line without thinking about it. I’ve heard the same excuse time and time again and argued it until blue in the face.
The Argument
The points raised are always the same. “It’s a security risk” because:
- Allowing people you don’t know to send you files is “always” a security risk.
- An attacker could send you a virus, and you might double click on it.
- An attacker could eat up all your bandwidth, creating a denial of service.
- An attacker could eat up all your disk space, creating a different denial of service.
- What happens if the attacker sends you a file with the same name as something important?
It is easy to counter every single one of these irrational fears. The first isn’t even a real complaint, it’s hear-say. The last isn’t either: auto-accepted downloads go into a folder with the name of the sender, so it’s impossible. The middle 3 are all true, but the first is mitigated by a virus checker and the same common sense you use when dealing with email attachments, and the last 2 are low risk and easily solved with the block button and the delete key.
Unfortunately, sense doesn’t permeate the heads of the paranoid without the voice of authority and an army of yes men to back it up. What (*always*) happens next is that rather than being presented with a good counter argument - which I’ve yet to hear - the following points are thrown at me.
- Yes, but users are too stupid to be safe so we have to be safe for them, and we’re not going to be responsible for mass IM hacking.
(Anyone would think I’d suggested this should be turned on by default!) - You should be using FTP to receive large files, not AIM.
(Spot the irony. If I need to accept files from “stupid users”, I can’t expect them to know how to use FTP; and who are you to say what I “should be” doing?) - Nobody uses the internet like you do.
(Apart from all the other hundred or so people I know who rely on this for their business.)
What a bunch of crap.
The Solution
Well, I finally did it. I fixed Gaim. I made a version of the auto-accept plugin that just accepts. Automatically. Like it ought to be doing!
Here’s a copy of the fixed plugin for Gaim 2.0.0beta6.
Finally I’m one step closer to IM bliss…
January 22nd, 2007 at 12:21 pm
I heart Ben.
January 22nd, 2007 at 10:15 pm
What a Ruler! (as in ‘you rule’)
January 24th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Wow, nice job!
Gaim’s written in C++ eh? I’ve been toying with learning that (C++) for years, but keep falling back on .NET (Sooo lazy!!!!)
January 29th, 2007 at 2:00 am
Ahh.. the miracles of instant pestering are astounding, instant pestering is like…. a god send.
You may or may not remember my nick from back in ‘em daze
I prefer IRC
Anyway, Just wanted to drop you a line and say high.
I met your sis on IRC way back in the last century (98 me thinks). But now we send each other hand-written letters, for (1) because she’s in Australia ATM LOL and (2) it’s just so much more personal and just a LOST-ART, which is exactly how I feel about good drum ‘n bass/jungle.. which you seem to pull out astoundingly well, thank you Ben for all the mind-blowing “food for thought” mixes throughout the years, been a fan of your mixes since 98 and am relieved to see you still at it, have you ever heard of microbe, here in San Diego?
their stuff is at outrecords.com and I have access to their vinyls , one of which I wanted to send you as a personal gift/request.
I’ve been wanting to arrange to send you some copies of their stuff to spin of your Xodus show, but have been afraid to ask, please send me a reply if you could arrange that, please?
happy new year and let 2007 year ring true as the age of magnificence for you and all your loved ones.
Bye for now
January 31st, 2007 at 11:59 pm
Hi,
I have the soft you want for your instant messaging:
Adium http://www.adiumx.com
complete auto-accept as well as every instant messaging protocol you could dream about managed in the same uniform way.
(it’s based over gaim too)
Perhaps the one problem 4 U: if you’re not in the right path (the Mac one
) you will have to consider switching to it to have all these great software you’re missing now.
Tchûss !
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Nicely done mate, nicely done.
February 20th, 2007 at 8:44 am
At last, thanks a lot!
March 16th, 2007 at 3:17 am
I’m one of the people you’ve had this conversation with, and I’ve given you all the reasons you’ve listed and I’ve backed them up. I’m not going to go into it again because it isn’t worth it.
But I do want to comment on “Yes, but users are too stupid to be safe so we have to be safe for them, and we’re not going to be responsible for mass IM hacking. (Anyone would think I’d suggested this should be turned on by default!)” for a minute.
You don’t support gaim on a regular basis, I do. You would be *astonished* at how stupid gaim users can be. I can’t even begin to tell you how often people complain that their gaim windows minimize automatically when they go Away and ask us how they can make it stop. When the only reason they do that is because they have loaded a plugin to make it happen in the first place. Same thing with the amount of people who ask us why gaim sends an autoreply to their buddies that isn’t their away message, or sends it despite having the auto-reply option off in the preferences, hint: there is an auto-reply plugin now (and it was just added in the last beta or two and I’ve already been asked almost two dozen times, and that’s just me). There are other similar issues but I think I’ve gotten my point across. Gaim users will *routinely* turn on plugins without fully understanding them and then totally forget that they did so. So, yes, gaim really does need to protect our users from themselves. It’s unfortunate but true.
Also in regards to “You should be using FTP to receive large files, not AIM. (Spot the irony. If I need to accept files from “stupid users”, I can’t expect them to know how to use FTP; and who are you to say what I “should be” doing?)”
There is nothing ironic about the fact that we suggest you try to use a mechanism designed for transferring files, the two sets of users you are talking about are not the same. But I don’t expect you to actually listen to me. Further, there are plenty of really easy to use ftp clients that support lovely drag and drop feature that work simply enough for anyone to use, the fact that people don’t use them isn’t my problem. I’m not going to bother responding to the ‘who are you…’ bit because it won’t go anywhere good.
Lastly, you were told numerous times to write a plugin, you accepted that that was a valid thing to be told and yet you spend most of this post blasting us for not doing things exactly the way you wanted them and for trying to prevent people who don’t know better (clearly you do) from opening their computers up to god knows what from god knows who. Until you run support for all the people who use gaim and get viruses, porn, or filled drives because gaim had an auto-accept plugin that they forgot they turned on I really don’t think you should be attempting to tell us what we should be doing. Insulting us for creating a client you like and not enabling stupid people to be tremendously stupid isn’t exactly a useful productive thing to do either.
I realize this posting is a tad old at this point but I was only just pointed at it today (by someone who I can almost guarantee is going to have bad things happen to him because of your changes, should he ever get them patched in and compiled) and felt I needed to comment.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Etan,
You are not one of the people who blindly regurgitates this line, you are one of the originators of it. I have no problem with people who’s opinions differ, but I have a big problem with people who assume that the conclusions of others are always good enough not to have to think about the issues for themselves.
It’s unfortunate that you have to support people who don’t understand what they’re doing. That’s the sort of thing that sends a man crazy, which I why I don’t. An aside: a similar situation happened with the radio station I play on. People start to moan about how something that’s 100% free “isn’t good enough” for one reason or another, and the owner nearly bottled out and quit from frustration. Fortunately there are bloody-minded people out there to keep such projects going.
But the fact is, I don’t get on with bloody-minded people when my mind is equally bloody but my opinion differs. And I resent being told how to use the internet.
My personal opinion on your plugin protectionist strategy would be that it’s better to warn a user that something happened by a plugin than to stop them from being able to do it at all, because otherwise Gaim becomes useless for power users, and that’s the point at which you lose power-user Gaim evangelists (such as myself - Gaim’s been a god send apart from this one issue) and gain a userbase full of people you don’t enjoy supporting… (clearly my opinion is biased.)
The irony is that FTP is much more difficult to use than AIM for “stupid users”. Gaim only works for me if it behaves, to the person that I’m talking to, like real world AIM does. The 3rd party does not know or care that I am using AIM; it is my job to make sure that any extra behaviours that my client has away from the expected norm are dealt with in a way that doesn’t freak out other people - because users are stupid as you well know. With no auto-accept, this goal (one born out of good netiquette) is impossible. I’m quite fed up of saying “sorry that didn’t work, I’m using Gaim”.
FTP is unfit for the intended purpose as you are well aware. I find it incredible that it was even suggested to me. Setting up FTP on a home PC behind ISP firewalls is often impossible. Training users (who just want to send you things on AIM) to use it is usually futile. If I wanted a protocol that was only usable by people with an IQ higher than 85, it would be fine. Sadly that’s an unrealistic goal.
I was told to write a plugin, and have. What I am blasting the people I refer to for is taking decisions that make your life easy at the expense of having a good client. If it was down to me, I’d say that it’s not your place to offer Gaim users tech support. There’s a manual and there are help groups. Defensive programming is one thing, and I think that this crosses that line.
Sorry if my tone of voice annoys you, but as you can see I have strong feelings on this topic.
Actually very happy that you replied at all, I thought I was shouting into thin air…