#15 User friendliness / hiding internals

[Menno]

Very nice package - highly appreciated! I've been fairly succesful at getting a lot of my non-geeky contacts to switch to Gaim + Gaim-encryption. These are the kind of people used to slick and friendly (cough) MS MSN / Win XP style interfaces. They're not used to being informed of the internal processes of their applications, and would get worried if they were.

Partly based on their feedback, I've noticed that gaim-encryption is relatively verbose. It talks about asking keys, resending stuff etc. on a day to day basis. To reduce the voodoo factor for a broader audience I think it would be good to hide these messages, unless something's really wrong (e.g. only mention trouble if 2 resend attempts failed etc.). Admittedly I'd appreciate it myself too, since the system messages would be restricted to those I need to act upon. And there could always be logfiles, verbose options etc for those that want to drive with the hood of the car open.

[Bill Tompkins]

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Point taken, although I hope that the only message you see
regularly is the "Requesting Key..." message. The others do
signify error conditions, and, given the event-driven nature
of the plugin (the plugin only gets control when a message
is sent, or received) there often isn't a second attempt to
do anything. For example, if you try to send an encrypted
message to a friend without the plugin, the plugin sends a
key request message, and returns control to Gaim. Since a
key never comes in, the plugin never gets control back. And
if the plugin never displayed anything on the screen, it
appears as though the outgoing message just got eaten, and
nothing happened.

Asking whether or not to accept a new key is something that
can be disabled in the preferences. It is a bit of a
security issue, though, which is why it is enabled by default.

-Bill