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frasten 3.19.09 / 7am

Hi, I’ve created .deb packages for linux, and put them on my PPA repository.
However I had to change something in your code, to make it compile and actually work.
All the patches are included in the .diff.gz file.
Contact me if you need info about the changes, and thank you very much for your plugin!

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Fahhem Reply:
March 19th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Thanks a bunch! The changelog names one of the changes I was trying to get going. However, none of the links work on the page, could you fix that?

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frasten Reply:
March 20th, 2009 at 2:19 am
Sorry, wrong copy&paste. This is the link to my repository, you can find the files under pidgin-gtalkinvisible link

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Raje Reply:
May 1st, 2009 at 8:57 am
@frasten,

does this work in jaunty? I’m trying to install this on a system running Jaunty 64 bit and the 64 bit deb file doesnt work.

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frasten Reply:
July 9th, 2009 at 11:27 am
@Raje,
I’ve just built the packages for jaunty, but I can’t test if it actually works under 64bits, I’ve only created the deb packages.

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Alex Reply:
July 20th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
@frasten, Hi frasten.
I installed the .deb file for i386 and when I try to enable it in Pidgin it get the error “ABI version mismatch 2.6.x (need 2.5.x)” I’m using Pidgin 2.5.8.

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frasten Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 6:56 am
@Alex, can you please try this package?

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frasten Reply:
July 21st, 2009 at 7:06 am
@Alex, Silly me, I meant this package =/

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smiki Reply:
July 31st, 2009 at 12:04 am
@frasten,

had the same problem but this latter package works
(using pidgin 2.5.5 ubuntu intrepid 8.10)

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frasten Reply:
July 31st, 2009 at 1:40 am
@smiki, Thank you for reporting

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Muthu 3.19.09 / 8am

Hi, was searching this for quite some time! thanks a lot!!!! This works beautifully!!!
Small request if I want add another XXMP, have u any work around for that?
Smiles,
Muthu

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Fahhem Reply:
March 19th, 2009 at 9:50 pm
It doesn’t crash if there’s more than one XMPP account, it just doesn’t work for one of them.

To update the plugin, one just has to replace some of the lines with calls to GList functions and iterate over a loop. It’s pretty trivial if they know how to use GTK+ tools (I don’t).

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Muthu Reply:
March 22nd, 2009 at 5:20 am
Thanks for the prompt reply
But the problem I faced when I was using two accounts was, I went offline but could not receive any messages from other persons. When I restarted the pidgin, I received those messages as offline messages! Any thoughts?

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Fahhem Reply:
March 23rd, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Well, this plugin is for going invisible, not offline. Try going Invisible instead.

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Muthu Reply:
March 23rd, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Hey I actually meant- When I chose invisible, i went invisible. When other person pinged me, I was not able to get the message. This was when I had two XMPP accounts.
After I deleted one of the XMPP accounts, this worked fine. so thought would there be any modification required for the making one account go invisible when I have two accounts,

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Fahhem Reply:
March 24th, 2009 at 11:47 am
The plugin adds the ability to go Invisible to the Jabber protocol in general, but only does the actual work (it has to send some text) for one of the accounts. I don’t think it does anything for the other account, so I’m not sure what’s happening.

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TrD 4.7.09 / 12pm

Hi, Im having some issues with this plugin. It seems to work fine, but if I change my status to online, and then back to invisible other people can still see me as online. Im using franten’s repo.

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Fahhem Reply:
April 7th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
There’s nothing in the code that would remember whether you’ve gone invisible before or not, it runs the same code every time you go invisible. Do you have more than one XMPP/Jabber/GTalk account?

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TrD Reply:
April 8th, 2009 at 1:08 am
Hello, thanks for the reply. I had 2 accounts, one gtalk and the other xmpp but I removed one and now I only have one account.

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Fahhem Reply:
April 8th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Did you do the above test with one or two accounts? Also, how did you “remove” the other account? It may still cause problems, I’m not too sure about how Pidgin handles disabled accounts.

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TrD Reply:
April 8th, 2009 at 8:46 am
I tested it with one account only. The other is not disabled, I removed it from the “Manage Accounts” menu. In this menu I only have one msn account and one xmpp (gtalk) account.

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Fahhem Reply:
April 8th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
I currently don’t have my normal computer, but once I get it back I’ll test it. Until then, could you check to see if this is consistent behavior? As in, does it fail to go invisible after one time, every other time, randomly?

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TrD 4.12.09 / 4am

I’ve been testing it and it doesnt happen every time, it seems random. And sometimes my gtalk contacts stay connected forever when im invisible, even if they are offline. I dont know if this is related to the plugin.

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Fahhem Reply:
April 12th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
can you get the XMPP Console plugin and view the XMPP data while going invisible and visible? When you go invisible, you should see two blocks, each with a 5 block and the second should say type=’unavailable’. Let me know if that shows up when you don’t go invisible.

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TrD 4.20.09 / 2am

I’ve removed pidgin and reinstalled and now all is working fine. The only thing missing is invisibility at startup, i hope that you are working on this feature, if it is possible to implement. Thank you for the plugin.

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Fahhem Reply:
April 20th, 2009 at 4:22 am
I’m pretty sure frasten got Invisible to work on start up. If not, I’ll look into it.

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Colin Reply:
August 17th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
@Fahhem, any luck with this? I am using pidgin at work on windows with your 0.9 plug-in and it doesn’t go invisible on start up.

Thanks,
Colin

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Fahhem Reply:
August 20th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
@Colin, I haven’t changed anything, no. You just have to go Available then Invisible when you start up Pidgin. Sorry.

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Colin Reply:
August 20th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
@Fahhem,

Thanks. I tend to get the odd drop-out and auto-reconnect puts me back on “visible”. A touch annoying when I get a message from the boss, when I thought I was invisible

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Colin Reply:
January 12th, 2010 at 5:21 am
@Fahhem, just looking at the source code and the purple library, wouldn’t it just require registering your “plugin_invisible_cb” function to the purple_signal_connect event “signed-on” as well as your “account-status-changed” event?

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Rafael 8.2.09 / 10am

I don’t think that’s how google talk does it. Not anymore, at least. You have to repeat the thing over and over if you want to see users’ updates. And, after you do that, you need to send a message to your buddy in order to him to be able to send you a message back. So it’s kind of broken.

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Fahhem Reply:
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:58 pm
@Rafael, If you could provide some more details, I’d be happy to incorporate it into the plugin.

What I’ve got is that I have to send something to the server every once in a while to see any updates.

For the sending a message bit, I’m able to send messages to invisible buddies that use the official gtalk program. Are you sure that holds true?

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Rafael Reply:
August 6th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
@Fahhem, I haven’t used your program, I found your blog when I was implementing a similar feature to pidgin. Sending made it go online and then offline on pidgin clients. So I couldn’t use that, I had to send a probe to each buddy. If I allowed it to sit there as unavailable for a long period of time, then buddies eventually weren’t able to talk to me if I didn’t send a message to them. I’ve both implemented that and tried it on xmpp console, both with the same results. I see no reason why it would be different with your plugin, although I really haven’t had the time to test it .

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Fahhem Reply:
August 6th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Are you implementing it into Pidgin officially?

Well, please let me know what you eventually find out. I’d be glad to provide a sort of backward-compatibility plugin if it does eventually go mainstream.

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zyguli 8.3.09 / 1pm

Hi,
I’d be happy to use the plugin, but it simply doesn’t work for me. I’m using Pidgin 2.5.8-2. The plugin is on the plugin list and I have only one Jabber/XMPP/GTalk account – Google one that is. I don’t have “Invisibile” on status list in Gtalk account. What’s wrong?

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zyguli Reply:
August 3rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
I use Fedora 11.

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Fahhem Reply:
August 6th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
I’ve never tested this on Fedora, but I never got this problem. The plugin adds “Invisible” to the list of status for the XMPP account when it starts up, then when you choose Invisible it sends some messages to the server.

Could you try closing Pidgin with the plugin enabled and then restarting it? Let me know if you have Invisible in the list now.

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zyguli 8.19.09 / 7am

Well, I have the plugin active all the time and since installing, I had restarted many times. No luck here.

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Fahhem Reply:
August 20th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
@zyguli, sorry. I don’t have any idea why this would happen. This is a very simple plugin and one line of it specifically adds Invisible to the statuses of the XMPP account.

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Vishesh Handa Reply:
December 13th, 2009 at 3:19 am
@zyguli,
I seem to be facing the same problem. I’m using Kubuntu 9.10.

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Miswired 12.27.09 / 8pm

Hi Fahhem,
Is there a way for me to use your plugin with Adium? on Mac?
I’d be glad to test it out if that’s a possibility.
Good job on the plugin regardless.
Cheers!

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Jason Croft 12.28.09 / 11am

Hi Fahhem,

Thanks for this plugin! A few things I came across:

* The plugin would crash as soon as I changed my status to “Invisible” in the current version of Pidgin 2.6.4 on both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10. I tracked it down to a seg fault in plugin_invisible_cb() around line 133. This fixed it for me:

PurpleConnection *gc = purple_account_get_connection(account);

* Also, using and does not work. Setting the presence to unavailable will stop the account from receiving presence updates and google:mail:notify will only check for new mail, not refresh the account’s roster. The documentation for the XMPP invisibility command can be found here: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0186.html. I’m trying to figure out how to adapt this to your plugin–if you make any progress, please let me know.

Thanks again!

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Fahhem Reply:
December 28th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
@Jason Croft, sorry about that segfault. I must have missed that when incorporating a patch. A new version has been uploaded with your change added.

* My plugin is only for the GTalk Invisibility command because the base of Pidgin developers refuse to add the functionality because Google went off-standard to add invisibility. If the standard you mentioned didn’t say “Implementation of the protocol described herein is not recommended.” at the top I would have considered it more.

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Jason Croft 12.28.09 / 2pm

Right right, my mistake–it appears Google’s implementation for invisibility does not use one of the several proposed XMPP standards. The only method that seems to work is , but I do not believe querying google:mail:notify will update the buddy list, rather it will only notify of new emails.

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Fahhem Reply:
December 28th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
@Jason Croft, it seems you tried to type something after “that seems to work is” but Wordpress removed it? What was it?

The google:mail:notify probably does check new mail. If you know of a way to update the buddy list, I’ll try to add that in so the buddy list doesn’t go stale for more than a minute or so.

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Jason Croft Reply:
December 28th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
@Fahhem, oops, yes, it cut off an xml statement, the one you use in your plugin that uses google:mail:notify. I’ve tried this command using the XMPP console and it did not appear to update the buddy list. Unfortunately I don’t know of any way to force an update for the buddy list once the presence has been set to unavailable, since this alerts to stop all update notifications. The closest hack I’ve found is to set the presence to available, receive the updates, then set it back to unavailable. I’m trying to look over the XMPP RFC to see if there is a better way and I’ll let you know if I find anything.

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kapt 1.3.10 / 3pm

Hey guys! Take a look at this patch http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4509 Works perfectly!

It’s supposed to work with version 2.6.3 but i’m using it with 2.6.2 and also works.

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Swarnendu Biswas 1.9.10 / 11pm

Hi,

I want to point out one change, the path of the plugin folder is different in Ubuntu from the one that you have mentioned. It is /usr/lib/pidgin for Ubuntu Karmic Koala 10.04.

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Anonymous 1.10.10 / 9pm

GTalk Invisible 0.922 still says 0.921 on the Plugins List.

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Fahhem Reply:
January 10th, 2010 at 11:16 pm
@Anonymous, I’ve fixed that. It now says .922

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Swarnendu Biswas 1.15.10 / 8am

Hello,

I am using Ubuntu karmic and pidgin 2.6.5 and the plugin version is .922. I am facing one problem, but am not sure about the reason. It often happens that although I have set invisible status, after sometime due to some reason my status is visible to others. For example, I set the status to invisible at evening time, and it worked. Now I keep the machine running and go off. When I come back in the morning, I see that people have pinged me claiming that I am online and visible to others.

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Conor 1.19.10 / 8am

Hey guys,

I’m running Arch Linux and Pidgin 2.6.5.
I’ve moved the .so file to my Pidgin plugins
directory, and it appears in the plugin list
but I can’t seem to enable it. If I click on it,
the checkbox beside it doesn’t become
checked and the invisibility option doesn’t
appear in the gtalk status list.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

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Friendly User 1.19.10 / 9am

Pidgin crashes when going off-line whilst using your gtalk invisible.

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Colin 1.25.10 / 5am

Hi, I installed the lastest 0.622 version and it crashes pidgin if the internet drops out. E.g., here is a windows backtrace while starting pidgin with no internet connected:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~cme/pidgin/pidgin.RPT

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umpa 2.4.10 / 5pm

@kapt : with the patch you mentioned, will one still be able to get updates?

thank you!

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Dan 2.15.10 / 3pm

This is a great plugin! One issue I’m having, of which you may already be aware: it doesn’t work properly at startup. That is, if you go straight from “offline” to “invisible”… something goes wrong and Google Chat will complain that “you are using a client which doesn’t support invisibility blah blah blah.”

I looked at the C source code and I see that the implementation is pretty straightforward: you send the necessary XMPP commands to turn on invisibility whenever the account status is changed to Invisible.

It may be that a different technique is needed when the previous status was Offline. I’m not sure exactly how to figure out what this should be… perhaps someone has a trace from an official Google client that shows how to do it properly?

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Dan Reply:
February 16th, 2010 at 10:30 am
Okay, I modified the code to fix this issue. Modified source code here:

http://tonquil.homeip.net/~dlenski/gtalkinvisible.c

Now it will properly enable invisible mode when you first sign on. What do you think?

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Dan Reply:
February 16th, 2010 at 11:58 am
A couple outstanding issues, since I can’t figure out where else to send ‘em

With my patch, there’s a very brief blip of non-invisible-ness immediately after sign-on, unlike with Chat in Gmail.

With this plugin in general, the invisible-ness sometimes seems to “wear off”. I assume that Pidgin sends some XMPP commands to update presence information, and doesn’t know to signal invisibility as desired. I don’t know enough about XMPP to know how to fix this. Anyone?

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Google Talk Invisible

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