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…

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.

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 !

happy new year and let 2007 year ring true as the age of magnificence for you and all your loved ones.
Bye for now

Gaim’s written in C++ eh? I’ve been toying with learning that (C++) for years, but keep falling back on .NET (Sooo lazy!!!!)