AOL contacts sometimes disappear / are listed as "offline"

[jsquyres]

This has been a long-standing problem in Adium that was just today determined to possibly be a libpurple issue. Please see this extensive ticket over on the Adium trac for details:

http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/6217

Short Version

Every once in a while when I launch Adium, all my AOL contacts will not appear (i.e., be listed as offline). But if I fire up a different IM client that supports AOL, I can see that at least some of my AOL contacts are online. Re-launching Adium (Pidgin) shows them [still] to be "offline." Note that this problem only appears to affect AOL contacts -- my Sametime/meanwhile contacts will always show up just fine.

This behavior repeats through multiple launches of Adium (Pidgin), and I can verify through other AOL clients (e.g., iChat) that at least some of my AOL clients are online at the same time (despite what Adium/Pidgin show me). I can "fix" the behavior by changing the privacy settings on my AOL account -- regardless of what its current privacy value is, changing it to any other value and then re-launching Adium (Pidgin) makes all my AOL contacts appear online.

It is difficult to track this behavior down (you'll see that the Adium ticket is over a year old) because it only happens once in a while -- perhaps a few times a month.

This behavior was replicated today on Adium 1.2b7 and Pidgin 2.3.1/Windows; the Adium developers directed me to file a ticket here on your trac.

I have previous attached anonymized logs on that Adium ticket (including what happened today in Adium); please let me know if I can provide any further information.

[jsquyres]

Oops -- a small clarification... Trac is sometimes a little misleading on exactly when tickets were opened. I said that the Adium ticket has been open for over a year, but actually it has been open for a little under a year; it looks like I opened the ticket in early Feb 2007.

[bernmeister]

Is this still happening in Pidgin 2.5.8?

[jsquyres]

I know that this has happened a non-zero number of times in the past, but since this ticket is almost 2 years old, I have both accepted this behavior as "normal" and therefore not been actively thinking about it (i.e., I don't remember the last time it happened -- whether it was recent or a long time ago).

Let's close it for now and if it happens again, I'll re-open it.

Thanks!