Messages not getting sent to/not getting received by Facebook contacts

[jesushlincoln@…]

Starting a few days ago, I noticed people were randomly trailing off and seemingly ignoring what I was saying in the middle of conversations over Facebook Chat using bitlbee-libpurple from the Debian repos. A few hours later I noticed that, up to the point they seemingly started ignoring me, all the messages I had sent appeared on the Facebook site as well as in irssi/Bitlbee, as was expected. However, after this arbitrary point in the conversation (usually after I've sent 4-10 lines of text) my messages/responses stop appearing anywhere other than in irssi and my irc logs, i.e. they fail to appear on the Facebook site and fail to be received by whomever I'm chatting with. However, all the messages I'm receiving from the other person appear everywhere just fine. So, receiving messages works as expected, but sending them appears to quit working after several messages for no apparent reason.

This only seems to be happening with Facebook Chat; I've successfully held full conversations since this started happening on Gtalk and Oscar, both with and without OTR, with no issues, as well as tweeted several times from Bitlbee. I upgraded to the latest version of bitlbee-libpurple in the Debian repos, restarted the bitlbee service several times, rebooted the machine several times, and even tried booting with several different kernels from 3.2 through 3.13rc6, all with identical results. Any help on this would be appreciated, and I will keep this thread posted on whether or not it spontaneously fixes itself for no reason like the last time I had Facebook Chat issues with Bitlbee (that time, my Facebook contacts randomly stopped appearing in the &bitlbee control room for about a week, and I couldn't initiate any Facebook Chat conversations, though if someone started one with me, it would show up with their user number even though I had/have nick_format set to %full_name, and I could then chat with the person; after a week it spontaneously started working correctly again in the middle of the same session without having logged out or rebooted at all and with no obvious explanation or reason. Maybe it was something on Facebook's end?).

[dx]

A few things:

1. I recommend joining #bitlbee in irc.oftc.net to discuss this issue, since we're not sure if this is an actual bitlbee bug, and we usually reply in less than 9 days there :P
2. You never mentioned the exact bitlbee version / what debian repo you got it from.
3. The OTR message loss bug (#1109) happens if you have the OTR plugin installed (or bitlbee compiled with otr built-in), setting otr_policy to never won't fix it (in fact, it makes things worse).
4. In case it's that specific bug, messages will only be lost if the other contact doesn't have OTR support in their client.
   I think it's more likely to have gtalk/oscar contacts with OTR support than facebook contacts, but that's just a guess.
5. Don't worry about the kernel version, that's irrelevant.
6. A really nice table explaining what bitlbee versions are "stable" can be found here ​http://wiki.bitlbee.org/VersionReference
7. Finally, the typical "catch-all issue" for facebook: Their XMPP service is just a gateway that is known to have several ​limitations and bugs we can't do much about. This might or might not apply in this situation.

[dx]

Just noticed it says "Debian Experimental" in the OS/Distro field. If that's debian sid, you're probably using the +otr4 builds which have the OTR bug (#1109). This bug has been fixed in the bzr versions since then, and it's also available in the apt repo at ​http://code.bitlbee.org/debian/

Closing as duplicate of #1109, feel free to reopen if the issue still happens after using one of the newer builds.

[jesushlincoln@…]

I realized that the bitlbee-libpurple and bitlbee-plugin-otr packages had been updated through the repos a day or two before I started having problems, and, sure enough, uninstalling bitlbee-plugin-otr fixed the issue instantly.

Just to be thorough, I went ahead and set up the bitlbee repo as an apt source and installed the latest bzr version, and have continued to have no problems whatsoever since then (aside from being unable to install the otr plugin, which I really don't miss all that much personally since I only used it with one contact, due to its requiring bitlbee 3.2.1+otr4+20131220+devel+1005-1 as opposed to the current 3.2.1+otr4+20140209+devel+1009-1).

[dx]

Oh, yeah, sorry about that.. the OTR plugin builds of the apt repo didn't get re-enabled after it became stable. Soon™.