Home

No Transports In Roster

In an effort to improve the look and feel of transports in your XMPP roster, we are working with an idea that transports will not be listed in your roster. This concept only works well, at least at present, when used with Wildfire's internals, since I can "listen" for your presence without having to hear real XMPP presence stanzas. We will have a minor analysis of the concept, pros and cons, and problems we run into here. Most likely this will also include some thoughts on how to deal with issues we run into.

Please be aware that you can set plugin.gateway.legacymode to true to continue to have transports show in your roster. It is not yet decided whether legacymode will default to true or false as we move forward.

Pros

  1. Transports can sometimes be a little confusing to some users. "What is this thing called ICQ Transport in my roster"? Worse, if you simply delete said transport, you will sever your registration with the transport in question. Not having them there eliminates that confusion/user education issue.

  2. Not having the transports in your roster is a little cleaner looking.

Cons

  1. Many clients get confused with transports if they are not in your roster. They may depend on the listing in the roster to believe that you are indeed subscribed. I know this to be the case with Psi. I'd like to gather a list of others. I will have a client list with known issues below.

  2. Some users -like- having the transports in their contact list so that they can see their presence reflected in their contact lists. Note that not all transports support the same list of presence as XMPP, so just because you are DND in your Jabber client doesn't mean you aren't just Away in AIM land. I happen to be one of these people. =)

  3. Many clients offer nifty easy interactions with transports by right clicking (or whatever) the transport item in your roster.

Known Client Issues

  1. Psi has a nifty option in the add new contact dialog where it detects transports and offers a pulldown of them. Then, if you choose the MSN transport for example, you will be able to enter a real MSN id (actual ninja@example.org address), click "Resolve" and it'll translate into a JID for you using the standard XEP-0100 translation service (jabber:iq:gateway) protocol.