Grouping buddies in bitlbee

[anonymous]

I heard it is in the TODO, but I thought of submitting it anyways. That is the ability to group buddies in user defined categories/groups.

[mbs]

Considering the IRC-like interface, we might want to put user-defined buddy groups into channels (possibly with unique names and/or behavior).

[wilmer]

Who is "we"? ;-)

But yes, that's exactly the plan.

[kroesjnov]

If this is ever implemented, I'd prefer users to join the buddy group channel, yet also still be available in the main channel.

[Chris Searle]

From discussion today on irc - just a question on - if we allow buddies to be members of more than one buddy group (as in IRC where you can be on several channels) - and private is set to false - if the buddy speaks - where should it go? All the relevant groups?

[anonymous]

There are groups stored on the AIM servers that I would be very pleased if my buddies showed up in.

[wilmer]

Oh, Chris Searle raises a very interesting question. Don't know how this will work exactly in the future. It might show up in the first channel where the buddy is. That's probably more likely than to show it in every channel.

Or it'll be a setting, of course. ;-)

(Sorry for the late response.)

[xwl]

My wishlist might be not same as this ticket. Hm, grouping buddies and grouping chat are two different issues.

One reason that i won't switch from Gaim to bitlbee is Gaim's grouping feature. For me, i just needs a visible grouping, it's okay all buddies are list in one channel. e.g.,

== work
foo
bar
== school
oof
rab

Should be quite easy to implement?

[MentalFS <bitlbee.org@…>]

In IRC, the server cannot determine in which order the userlist is shown. Most clients sort them by privilege (Operator, Voice, Normal) and then by alphabet. But that is entirely up to the client. So there is no reliable way to insert group separators into the list of users in a channel.

Using channels seems the best way to translate groups to IRC. I would like to see &bitlbee as some kind of special group, either catching all buddies that are in no group at all or just containing all buddies. This could be configurable.

For the channel thing, I see several possiblilities.

• The message goes to &bitlbee - maybe only if this is set to "contain all buddies".
• The message goes to the first channel the user is in - which leads to the question: what is the first one? The first in the alphabet? The first one in order of creation? The first group the buddy was added to? Maybe this could also work with last.
• The message goes to all channels.

Above that, I think BitlBee should remember where the user responded to the buddy the last time. Like it happens when you talk to a buddy in &bitlbee, the buddies' messages are routed to the channel even if private is set to true.

[MentalFS <bitlbee.org@…>]

I just realized... none of my IM clients ever offered me to add a buddy to several groups. So of course there is one other option:

• Do not allow a buddy to be in multiple groups.

Maybe this is not possible at all with the supported protocols (on the server side). BTW this grouping should, if possible, be syncronized with the servers.

[Eric]

I would greatly appreciate being able to do this in Bitlbee.

[Ronny]

I'd also vote for adding this feature.

[edwin@…]

Hehe, my 2 cents. blist could also be used for this, add another column next to Status, expand the functionality of blist to sort on groups also and then the client can take care of it itself from there. (then again, a group "glist" could then also be created, ofcourse :))

[anonymous]

I like Edwin's idea. It would be also useful to have subgroups that can be accessed using "glist parent".

[anonymous]

Ah, now with facebook, yahoo, msn messenger, google chat and all such in my messenger, I constantly have more than 100 nicks on the same channel which is quite a mess! If only had even that visible grouping or such...

[wilmer]

This will be in the next major release. If you can survive for just another few weeks? :-)

[wilmer]

See ​http://wiki.bitlbee.org/UiFix for a new branch that has this code. It will be merged into mainline and become a major release as soon as it stabilises.

[wilmer]

I just merged ui-fix into mainline.