Bitlbee appears offline to others when it isn't.

[shirow@…]

Bitlbee logs onto my ICQ account. I am not away in any manner, nor am I invisible, or at least, if I am, bitlbee won't tell me. All communications go through normally.

A friend with centericq sees me as offline regardless of whatever I do with it - I tried readding him, bouncing on and off, setting away and removing it, and various combinations thereof.

We tried to figure out whether centericq was at fault, but using Adium (which is, I'm told, a Gaim derivative) gave no useful results.

Where do I dig?

[shirow@…]

Some further experiments:

• The ICQ account appears online for an instant, and then immediately goes offline.

• Choice of an IRC client connecting to bitlbee has no effect whatsoever upon this.

In short, it's a protocol bug of some sort.

The bug might prove very hard to replicate, because we've determined that it only shows up for certain ICQ accounts, but not for other ones. We've also remembered that exactly the same effect started happening with the same account back in 2003 - that drove me to switch from icq98 to Trillian, which did not exibit this problem.

[wilmer]

Yes, the ICQ module is a real PITA. :-(

So you say that ICQ98 started to have this problem in 2003? Hrmmm, then this kind of stuff really has as much to do with the age of the OSCAR implementation as with its crappines... :-(

Unfortunately I can't really tell when problems like this will be fixed. I already spend my time on the BitlBee core and other protocol modules, I hardly know how to OSCAR module works in the first place...

[anonymous]

Hi,

i hope this can help. I had the same problem and in my case this was the solution:

When you log on with ICQ 6 (not 5.1) you have the option of setting your status to "ICQ-standard" or "invisible". Once you set the status to "invisible" it gets saved on the ICQ-server and remains set even if you go offline.

You now appear to be offline to all users and can not change this with the "/away" command. You have to log on with ICQ 6 and set the status to "ICQ-standard".

Now you're seen as online but can also change to invisible-mode with "/away invisible"

[pho@…]

I have exactly the same problem. When I close Miranda IM in the invisible-mode and log in with bitlbe, no one can see me in ICQ. I have to restart Miranda IM and set me to available and now I'm visible to in bitlbee.

[dx]

No reports of anything like this in a few years, considering it fixed. If it's somehow still an issue open a new ticket.