921245 - Away Status Indicator in Thunderbird IRC Chat

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Chat Core :: IRC, defect)

Description

[William Budington]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130911163500

Steps to reproduce:

Create IRC account, log on to IRC, join chat


Actual results:

All members of the chat are greyed out on the right-hand participants list.


Expected results:

The members of the channel that are not marked as /away should not be greyed out.
This necessitates checking with the server to see who in a channel is away.

Some clients expose this to the user, for instance in weechat:
irc.server.freenode.away_check
irc.server.freenode.away_check_max_nicks

Comment 1

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

(In reply to William Budington from comment #0)
> Expected results:
> 
> The members of the channel that are not marked as /away should not be greyed
> out.
Grey means that the user has not spoken in that chat recently, not that the user is away. It has nothing to do with presence.

> This necessitates checking with the server to see who in a channel is away.
This is extremely hard (although getting easier) without constantly pinging the server to get information on nicks. I find this unacceptable and it either 1. frequently doesn't work, or 2. can easily result in bans.

We already check if nicks are away if you add them to your buddy list. (Although this code could use a few improvements...)

Comment 2

[aleth [:aleth]]

You can easily get the current status of a nick from the tooltip (by hovering over the nick). 

We can't poll the server for all nicks automatically for the reasons given in comment #1.