953670 - Remove useless lines from buddy list tooltips

Status: REOPENED

(Chat Core :: XMPP, enhancement)

Description

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 224 at 2009-08-24 17:53:00 UTC ***

There are a few lines in the tooltips of the buddy list that convey very little information, if any.

Examples:
 For MSN buddies:
   Has you: yes
   Blocked: no
 For XMPP buddies:
   Subscription: both

These lines are useless because it's the default value that is almost always true, so the exact same lines appear for all buddies.

Another example: the line "Account". It gives information only if the user has several accounts of the same protocol. If there is only one account with this protocol, the line is totally useless. When there are several accounts and the buddy is in the buddy list of several of the accounts, the "Account" line is misleading, it should be "Accounts" and be a comma separated list of accounts that see the buddy online.

We should cleanup these tooltips. When a user goes through the buddy list and hovers each buddy to see the tooltip and know details, each line that contains no information is a waste of time.

Comment 1

[Instantbot]

*** Original post on bio 224 by Michael <Prescience500 AT gmail.com> at 2009-09-14 22:55:14 UTC ***

It may be almost always the same answer, but doesn't that mean that it is sometimes different? If it doesn't require too much additional code from what there will be once it is removed or effort from just removing the lines, could there be a way to view it?

Perhaps adding (or just not removing them if they are already there) preferences in about:config that could be changed to turn these lines back on.

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 224 at 2009-09-15 06:36:18 UTC ***

(In reply to comment #1)
> It may be almost always the same answer, but doesn't that mean that it is
> sometimes different?

The idea here is not to remove these lines completely, but to remove them only when they provide no information at all because they display the default value.

Comment 3

[Benedikt Pfeifer]

*** Original post on bio 224 at 2010-08-06 14:01:59 UTC ***

(In reply to comment #2)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > It may be almost always the same answer, but doesn't that mean that it is
> > sometimes different?
> 
> The idea here is not to remove these lines completely, but to remove them only
> when they provide no information at all because they display the default value.

That would either require protocols to provide which values are default or to special case them in Ib's source directly? The latter doesn't sound good to me.

Comment 4

[Benedikt Pfeifer]

*** Original post on bio 224 at 2011-09-10 19:16:02 UTC ***

Assuming we need to special-case every single set of label/value (pairs) that we want to remove leads to the problem that the labels and values are localized.

Is there any other way than loading the string bundle for every protocol that needs treatment, look up the localized values of the rows and of the default values that we don't want to show and filter based on the translated strings?

Is this really a sane way to fix the bug?

Comment 5

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 224 at 2011-09-10 20:26:07 UTC ***

(In reply to comment #4)

We can just remove the C code that inserts the lines we don't want.
I don't expect the coding work to be hard here. Figuring out which lines are useful may be a bit more time consuming.

Comment 6

[Benedikt Pfeifer]

*** Original post on bio 224 at 2013-11-10 22:51:25 UTC ***

(In reply to comment #0)

> Another example: the line "Account". It gives information only if the user has
> several accounts of the same protocol. If there is only one account with this
> protocol, the line is totally useless. When there are several accounts and the
> buddy is in the buddy list of several of the accounts, the "Account" line is
> misleading, it should be "Accounts" and be a comma separated list of accounts
> that see the buddy online.

I spun this part off into bug 955695 (bio 2247) as it touches tooltip code instead of protocol code and seemed different enough to justify that.

Comment 7

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

The only remaining valid bit of this applies to XMPP, I think.