Following is a list of protocols supported by Gaim and the privacy
features I was able to gather from their native clients. It also
speaks a little of how Gaim is missing certain features and supports
other already.
AIM (http://www.aluink.net:96/gaim/#AIM)
Gaim, as would the name suggest, seems to have modeled it's privacy
options from the options available in AIM. Though there are a few
missing. AIM supports allowing others to see if a user is: idle,
typing, using mobile, and updates to blogs and profiles. Not being an
AIM user, I'm not sure if Gaim supports mobile device and blogs, but I
know that it can support the idle and typing feature. These two and
maybe the others can be added to Gaims privacy options.
Gadu-Gadu
Being in Polish, I have yet to find a client which I can understand.
Unless I either learn Polish, unlikely or someone is able to amend
this document, I am unable to report on the privacy features of Gadu
Gadu.
Groupwise
Not having access to a Groupwise network, I am unable to research this
protocol. If someone uses this protocol and knows what we could do,
it'd be nice to know.
IRC
Other than /ignore, I believe the only thing we could do here is maybe
ignore people's voices. Then again, I'm not a huge IRC user, so there
might be other things we could do here.
Jabber
Being an open source protocol, privacy settings are often client
based. So we can maybe come up with our own options for privacy here
that would accommodate most systems.
MSN (http://www.aluink.net:96/gaim/#MSN)
The privacy setting here seems to be rather simple. Users can either
only share their status and receive messages from an "Allow List" or
deny access to specific users in a "Block list". It also supports
setting whether a user is notified of others adding them to their
contact list. Though Gaim supports notification of being added by
another user, we could add the enabling/disabling of these
notifications.
Simple
None available
Sametime
Wasn't able to find information on this protocol.
Yahoo (http://www.aluink.net:96/gaim/#Yahoo)
This protocol seems to be the one that Gaim is the most lacking in.
It supports an array of options. They are:
-Always sign in invisibly
-Allow Yahoo! websites to show when a user is online
-Idle timeout
-Showing to other users how long a user has been idle
Based on how much of these features Gaim supports we can also add the following:
-Changing status based on
--listening to LAUCHcast Radio
--playing games in Yahoo Games
--Showing webcame and displaying a message
-Playing Yahoo Games in messenger
-Allowing plugins to set clickable status messages
A lot of this is based on what Gaim supports and then dealing with the
privacy of those features. Nonetheless, I feel there are enough
options missing across these few protocols and potentially more if
research can be done in the few I was unable to do them for.
I would like to propose working on improving Gaim's privacy support
and documenting those improvements.
Eric
--
"Every man dies, not every man really lives."
--- William Wallace
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