feature request: IM Clemency

[cmeador]

I accidentally blocked achearing on AIM and didn't realize it for several months! This is because she stopped using AIM for a while (long story) and we continued to chat on Yahoo, so I figured she had dropped it altogether. It turned out that I had accidentally clicked the "block" button without realizing it. Part of my work at the office involves

Comments

[achearing]

I think it is a very good idea. I probably would have noticed something sooner if we had not been talking on Yahoo. It's kind of funny though.

[betacentauri]

You write software specs? Cool! :) Who do you work for? I'm a software developer.. and unfortunately I work with incomplete or poorly written specs all too often.

I think this is definitely a great idea and should be implemented in Pidgin/Adium. Did you consider making the blocking interval part of the blocking dialog? So that if you really wanted to block someone specific forever you'd have to explicitly say so?

[cmeador]

It's more like bug reports and feature requests. I try to be very detailed, sometimes I even look at the code and suggest exactly what to do. I work for Discovery: http://discoveryeducation.com/products/assessment/

Thanks! I think that is a good idea, specifying the duration in the block dialog. The whole problem I had is that Adium doesn't present a dialog (maybe it does optionally but it didn't prompt me). I usually don't bother sending in feature requests but sometimes I am pleasantly surprised when someone implements something I've been wishing for. Most recently this happened with an email attachment reminder, something I've been dreaming of for years: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/5759

[betacentauri]

Sounds like you're part of a test team? At least your description of your job is pretty similar to the test team at work.

Adium does present a dialog, at least for me. I click the contact, go to the contact menu, click block (or hit command-option-B) and it asks if I really want to block them. I don't think I've done anything to make that happen, but then again my Adium config is fairly custom. I'm also running the latest 1.3 beta, so it's possible this is new.

Feature requests are always nice to get, though unfortunately, sometimes they're ignored for a long time. Lots of software projects make it too hard to submit feature requests or other ideas to the developers.

[cmeador]

Actually my official title is manager of quality control -- content finalization, copy editing, proof reading, etc. I'm also a sort of liason between the content team and the rest of the operations (online delivery, programming, customer service, sales, etc) so I end up spending a lot of the day doing random stuff like writing bug reports and translating sales data into print orders. It's like 180 degrees from my former position as a math item writer, where I had a very focused domain and no interruptions! It's pretty nice doing so many new and different things though, I get to learn a lot of interesting things on a daily basis.