Plus! color tags

[daniele_athome]

I wrote a patch that registers a new signal in the gtkblist.c file. That signal will be called one moment before g_escape_markup_text will be called. The callback will return an already-escaped version of the name.

I also wrote a test plugin that makes all the buddies red :)

[daniele_athome]

This zip file contains both the test plugin and a patch for gtkblist.c

[daniele_athome]

the test plugin now parses all the plus! tags in buddy list, but doesn't make gradient nicks.

[resiak]

patch extracted from plusblist.zip

[resiak]

For future reference, don't put patches into zip archives, just attach them straight to the ticket.

[rekkanoryo]

There are a number of problems I see with this patch right off the bat:

• // comments are not valid ANSI C.
• Use of g_debug is strongly discouraged. Use the libpurple-provided debugging API, which is covered quite well in the API documentation and the plugin howto wiki pages.
• Parameters to functions need spaces between them. For example, foo(parm1, parm2) instead of foo(parm1,parm2). The lack of spaces makes code very unreadable.

[kasmol]

Great!! Please continue to develop it!!

[Twain28]

Anything new about this? People on MSN are increasingly using bbcode to set colors, styles and text dimentions....this patch could come in handy.

[jgoguen]

CC myself

[jgoguen]

Attempt at cleaning up the previous patch for this ticket.

[ekerazha]

Any chance to see this patch included?

[olivier]

Great plugin ! The 2.5.0 milestone of pidgin is really fantastic for new MSN features. But I've got many friends who *need* (that's what they say) colored plugins, so they use Windows Live Messenger and Plus. daniele_athome, did you stop working on this ? Maybe I'll try to add gradient nicks support. Would it be possible to have smileys in nicks too ? I'm not familiar with pango.

[daniele_athome]

This plugin was just an experiment to see if the community was interested to this feature. Personally I don't even like Microsoft MSN protocol and its IM chat system (bad designed protocol, very slow servers). Only some countries and only specific group of people use MSN messenger with colorful nicks (es. very little children or Italians people (sigh)). I'm doing my word hard trying to persuade my friends to switch to the jabber protocol: people let's realize it, MSN is becoming to have its age.

Anyway, if someone is really interested in continuing development (instead of porting friends to jabber :) I will be more than happy to discuss and to explain the plugin code.

[olivier]

I understand and totally agree, but I've got a different approach. I try to make people switch to another, better, MSN client (instead of Live Messenger) and then convince them to have an XMPP account, that's easy because pidgin supports multiple accounts and protocols. I also have friends who would switch to Linux instead of Windows, but the only show-stopper is "what ? there's no colored nicks in msn ?".

People will always use crappy things. I can't convince all my friends/familiy to switch to another IM protocol, or (for example) to not use this commercial thing called facebook. With this "msn plus nicks" plugin, pidgin will be more attractive to the msn "plus" userbase, and that's a progress.

Do you have a more recent snapshot than the attached 0.0.2 sources, so that the community can continue developing it ?

[daniele_athome]

No I'm sorry I have not. Should it be compatible with the current version of piding, shouldn't it? (at least the plugin, the patch is too old obviously, but it is pretty simple to reimplement)

[olivier]

It's ok with the current version (pidgin-plus-0.0.2.tar.gz). I tested it today with pidgin 2.5.0 + bug4598-plus_colour-cleaned.patch

[daniele_athome]

:-)

[abesto]

Accept /c=#RRGGBB style closing tags.

[elb]

This patch looks like a memory leak waiting to happen -- it strdup()s a string returned from a signal and discards the signal result. I would generally expect the signal handler in a situation like this to have allocated the string it wished to return.

It's also not clear to me why this signal is named "drawing-buddy" and takes a buddy as an argument, but seems to be utilized only to return markup for the buddy's username. A more specific signal name which indicates this rather limited scope would be appropriate here.

It looks to me like the whole purpose of this plugin is to handle MSN's ill-conceived username markup language; this is something which should properly be handled by the MSN protocol plugin. Perhaps a signal should be emitted from the MSN protocol plugin to the effect of msn-buddy-parse-markup, with a default implementation of simply stripping these codes from the nickname.

[QuLogic]

Replying to elb:

It looks to me like the whole purpose of this plugin is to handle MSN's ill-conceived username markup language; this is something which should properly be handled by the MSN protocol plugin. Perhaps a signal should be emitted from the MSN protocol plugin to the effect of msn-buddy-parse-markup, with a default implementation of simply stripping these codes from the nickname.

This is not technically part of the MSN protocol. It is part of Messenger Plus!, which hacks on various things like coloured nicks, skins, funky logs, and who knows what else.

[darkweasel]

Personally, I think that you don't need to make them colored, just allowing these [c=15][b]foo/b/c=24 to be cancelled out, so that something like "[b][c=9][a=1]lenii <3/a/c/b" just displays as "lenii <3" (that's a real nick of one of my buddies, btw).

[MastroPino]

I think that this plugin need to be improve, we need some option like a double visualization, I mean plus and anti-plus for example. And I don't understand why this is resting a patch, c'mon every one that use that stupid MSN protocol have for sure a contact in his/her buddy list that use plus tag! Personally every my account use it! Please some one improve this essential patch.

[markuznw]

Please someone keep up this patch, as of italian user it's pretty impossible to live with a contact list flooded of bbcode tags from plus.

[daniele_athome]

I decided to regain the development of this plugin again, I'll begin in the next days, as soon as I can. Thank you to everyone for your vote and comments.

[Universe_JDJ]

That's great news! As I'm primarily a MSN user, my contact list has been growing more and more unreadable as time goes by. Thanks for picking this up again.

[daniele_athome]

I think you all should switch to jabber :P

[Universe_JDJ]

Unfortunately, switching average users over to another protocol never works. In my area, everyone uses MSN exclusively, and it's essentially impossible to change that.

[MastroPino]

At the end I find an italian user that compily pidgin with this patch and he has integrated the plus plugin. please check is site and is repository here: http://polpoinodroidi.com/2009/03/09/il-mio-primo-repository/ or http://polpoinodroidi.com/

Grazie Polpoino!

[markuznw]

Well thanks for the link mastropino but it would be nice to have it included into mainstream and maybe compiled for windows too. I don't actually know any windows multi im client that have color nicks support for msn :P Waiting for updated version

[MastroPino]

Replying to markuznw:

Well thanks for the link mastropino but it would be nice to have it included into mainstream and maybe compiled for windows too. I don't actually know any windows multi im client that have color nicks support for msn :P Waiting for updated version

This is good if u wanna try or are lazy for compile it I hope that it will be integrated but I loose all hope!

[daniele_athome]

Upgraded Pidgin patch to gtkblist.c

[daniele_athome]

Upgraded plugin for Pidgin - version 1 (without gradient colors)

[daniele_athome]

I fixed some little things, and now it works with Pidgin 2.5.5. I didn't try it on other platform, but It should work anyway.

Next step: gradient colors :-)

[daniele_athome]

FOR PIDGIN ADMINS: I think you should include my patch in trunk, because it may be useful for other purposes, besides Plus! color tags.

[deryni]

You need to modify the patch to address the issues (the first two at least) brought up by elb.

[daniele_athome]

Replying to elb:

This patch looks like a memory leak waiting to happen -- it strdup()s a string returned from a signal and discards the signal result. I would generally expect the signal handler in a situation like this to have allocated the string it wished to return.

Already fixed, I'll post the upgraded patch tomorrow morning.

Replying to elb:

It's also not clear to me why this signal is named "drawing-buddy" and takes a buddy as an argument, but seems to be utilized only to return markup for the buddy's username. A more specific signal name which indicates this rather limited scope would be appropriate here.

The name is absolutely not self-explaining, you can change with anything you want :) The handler should a have a buddy because of the information it can retrieve; passing only the buddy alias string could not be enough; for example, the plugin should colorize the buddy only if the user hasn't defined a custom alias.

Replying to elb:

It looks to me like the whole purpose of this plugin is to handle MSN's ill-conceived username markup language; this is something which should properly be handled by the MSN protocol plugin. Perhaps a signal should be emitted from the MSN protocol plugin to the effect of msn-buddy-parse-markup, with a default implementation of simply stripping these codes from the nickname.

In windows, Plus! nicks are managed by a windows live messenger patch (that is messenger plus!), and it is not a protocol extension; all is based on having that patch installed; that patch will render colored nicks correcly.

[daniele_athome]

Fixed a memory leak

[daniele_athome]

I think I accidentally gave a negative vote to the ticket :( admins, can you fix? It should be 5 votes...

[markuznw]

http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-plus/ keep an eye on this, maybe someone is starting a similar project :p

[echelon89]

I think that bb code sould be removed in the dialog that appears when you go over a contact with the mouse

[darkrain42]

Masca just pointed out that this patch won't affect the drawing of the buddy name in the conversation window, which is problematic.

[MastroPino]

Replying to echelon89:

I think that bb code sould be removed in the dialog that appears when you go over a contact with the mouse

Yes and in the notify too!

[markuznw]

Hey, any updates about gradients and/or issues pointed out by darkrain? :)

[daniele_athome]

Replying to markuznw:

Hey, any updates about gradients and/or issues pointed out by darkrain? :)

Hi, I have very little time for developing this plugin, I will let you know about my progress as soon as I have something.

[MastroPino]

Replying to daniele_athome:

Replying to markuznw:

Hey, any updates about gradients and/or issues pointed out by darkrain? :)

Hi, I have very little time for developing this plugin, I will let you know about my progress as soon as I have something.

Daniel thanks for ur work =)

[darkrain42]

Ticket #10102 has been marked as a duplicate of this ticket.

[daniele_athome]

Hi, despite of my efforts finding the time for this plugin is very hard. I have very limited time, so I must abandon the development. However, another developer took the code and continued development, implementing gradient nicks too:
http://polpoinodroidi.com/2009/10/01/pidgin-plus-con-gradienti/

Page is in Italian, I'm posting some urls for your convenience:

PPA repository: https://launchpad.net/~frasten/+archive/ppa/+packages
GIT repository: http://github.com/frasten/pidgin-plus