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More FAQ migration from the old site.

PidginCommunity

Finding Us

Where can I find Pidgin-related chat online?

There are two primary Pidgin-related chat resources:

  • #pidgin on irc.freenode.net (IRC)
  • devel@conference.pidgin.im (XMPP MUC or Multi-User Chat)

Developers, contributors, and users alike are welcome to join us in either of these fora.

Is there a user mailing list?

We maintain only one general-topics mailing list for Pidgin, libpurple, and finch, and it is devel@pidgin.im (Mailing Lists). Users and developers alike are welcome to post to this mailing list, and indeed many topics on the list are about usability and features, rather than nitty-gritty development details.

Community Topics

Can I help?

Yes! We especially need small patches for small bugs, and lots of bug triaging. There are a slew of a bug reports in Pidgin's ticket system - you could pick one and try to tackle it and submit a patch. We love patches!

Bug triaging is when you look at a bug report and determine whether it is a duplicate of an earlier report, or whether it is user error, or maybe you need to request additional information to be able to reproduce the bug. We don't allow people to modify ticket attributes, but if you leave a helpful comment on the ticket with your findings, we will take appropriate action. This is a significant help to us, because it allows fewer people to have to focus primarily on maintenance of the ticket system, while other development resources are spent as well as they can be.

Can I ask you about third-party plugins, patches, etc.?

You are more than welcome to ask, but be prepared for the answer to be something like "ask the authors". We simply don't have the time or energy to keep up with all of the third-party projects out there, so we probably can't help you. Common topics that fall into this category are various encryption plugins, !GFire, and various Purple Plugin Pack plugins.

Where should I report bugs, feature requests, or patches?

Here.

Hello?

We don't know the answer to this question. Stop asking it.

Miscellaneous Questions

What will the next version be numbered?

Starting with version 1.0.0, Pidgin version numbers have 3 parts to them. The format is major.minor.micro. If we change something internally in Pidgin such that some plugins won't work with the newer version, we will increment the major version number. If we don't increment the major version number, and we've added things to the Pidgin API that won't break any older stuff, we will increment the minor version number. In any other cases, we will increment the micro version number. Even and odd numbers have nothing to do with stability, and you should always be running the latest release of Pidgin to get new features and bug fixes.

So, can I look forward to mega-sexy super functionality with Pidgin?

Yes, that is the intended idea. In fact, there have been quite a number of unpopular geeks who have made the switch to Pidgin. In a matter of days, the number of dates and awesomeness points received by the geek increased ten fold! You, too, can have an exciting life with Pidgin. Get Pidgin. Get the babes. Get uhh... hmm.

(Yes, that's a joke.)

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