[Wocky] Buddy Authorization

[Joel N. Weber II]

I think a more general question is whether the goal is for an Athena
Jabber server to provide the same semantics as zephyr currently does,
or whether jabber is supposed to provide support for some other
culture.

I get the impression that there are many zephyr users who would be
unhappy if jabber were to replace zephyr without providing a similar
user experience.

But I'm not clear on what problem the Athena jabber server is supposed
to solve.  (On the other hand, if it's not supposed to be a zephyr
replacement, what does it offer that AIM doesn't?)

How does jabber's current buddy authorization interact with jabber
conferences?  Occasionally I participate in conversations on zephyr
classes where it ends up being useful to move to personals, and on
rare occasions this involves someone who I wouldn't happen to have
already authorized as a buddy, and so the semantics of letting anyone
send are useful.  Every now and then we see a webzephyr user carrying
out an extensive conversation on a zephyr class trying to get someone
to subscribe to webzephyr so that they can send a personal message,
which is somewhat annoying for everyone else who's watching the class.

I think it's also the case that jabber was designed with the idea that
anyone anywhere on the Internet would normally be able to connect,
without any strong mechanism for authenticating the users.  In such a
context, buddy authorization probably makes a _lot_ of sense.  If you
have a system that discourages annoymous messages from being sent
through relatively strong authentication of users, needing to
authorize each user you individually talk to probably becomes much
less of a problem.