Pidgin spammed my chats with a "Happy New Year!" message

[avdi]

Last night I opened my laptop briefly to watch the ball drop on Hulu. This morning when looking at my chat logs I found that at 12:00:15EST "I" wrote identical "Happy New Year!" messages to every open chat window. This included both IRC windows and IM windows.

I never touched Pidgin while I had my laptop open at midnight. I closed it immediately after and no one else used it. And anyway I'm not even aware of a Pidgin feature that would let someone type the same message to every open window at the exact same time.

Is this some kind of "easter egg"?

I'll be discontinuing my use of Pidgin at least until I can get to the bottom of this. I can't trust a chat client that pulls this kind of stunt.

[rekkanoryo]

This is caused by a third-party plugin. The plugin in question is the "Irssi Features" plugin from the Purple Plugin Pack, and the message was intended to be an easter egg.