Subject: [Wocky] access to see a new user's presence

From: Ken Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 18:04:33 -0500

Is there some trick to when you can add a contact and have them  
eventually get prompted to grant permission for you to see them online?

I ran into a situation today where I had added someone a few days  
ago, and today was the first time she signed on to the mit.edu jabber  
server.  When she did, she didn't get prompted, but I deleted her  
from my contact list and re-added her, and then she did.  Was this  
just a random hiccup, or do you generally have to wait until someone  
has signed on at least once before you can add them as a contact?  Do  
the Jabber accounts not exist (on the mit.edu server setup) before  
the first sign-on, so that my adding a non-existent contact gets some  
special, lame treatment?

I've got quite a few contacts I added because I just copied their  
names over from my Zephyr .anyone file, and if I have to go back and  
figure out which ones I should delete because they haven't signed on  
ever, or didn't before I added them, that'll be a real pain.  I  
understand the privacy issue involved in figuring out which accounts  
those might be from data on the server.  I could just delete and re- 
add all the @mit.edu contacts I don't recall having seen on Jabber,  
but it's not clear to me if that has any annoying side effects, like  
revoking their access to see me online, or re-prompting them if  
they've already chosen to deny me access to see them, or  
something....  (Can I just re-add them without deleting them?  Would  
that work?)

Ken

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From: Greg Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 00:16:18 -0500

You may be correct that adding a contact before they first log into
jabber.mit.edu results in the initial request being black-holed.

Pidgin has a "re-request authorization" right-click menu option on
contacts.  I don't know if Adium has one as well.

On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 18:04 -0500, Ken Raeburn wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> Wocky mailing list
> [email-masked]
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/wocky

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From: [email-masked] (Dennis Baron)
Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:15:04 -0500

> jabber.mit.edu results in the initial request being black-holed.

I'm assuming that the account does not exist on the server until the
user actually connects for the first time.  So I would expect the
server to discard the request.

A nice feature might be to send the new contact email in this case
letting them know that "[email-masked] has tried to add you as a
buddy" with instructions on how to use the service?  But you might
want to restrict this to requests from other mit.edu users.

		      Dennis

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From: Ken Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 09:46:38 -0400

> jabber.mit.edu results in the initial request being black-holed.

Seems like a bug.  At least, depending on the model we want to  
present.  Some better options: Give an error on the request to add a  
contact that doesn't exist (yet), if we're assuming that someone with  
a Kerberos identity may never create their Jabber account.  Or  
consider the Jabber account "created" automatically once the user has  
a Kerberos id (or allow any string named as a contact, or any string  
that corresponds to a Kerberos id), and remember the authorization  
request, even if the user has never signed on so far.

I checked on Friday with another contact whose presence I hadn't been  
allowed to see, and that also turns out to be a case of adding a  
contact before the first sign-on.

> contacts.  I don't know if Adium has one as well.

I don't see it, but I can fire up pidgin and play with it.  It also  
seems to show whether authorization requests are pending, unlike  
Adium; I assume rejections wouldn't show up as pending, so re- 
requesting authorization only from those contacts where it's pending  
looks like the right answer.

Ken