pidgin-facebookchat spams facebook with idle messages

[Chris Cheney]

Binary package hint: pidgin-facebookchat

Pete Graner's gwibber locked up and apparently started posting idle messages to facebook every 10 min or so:

http://www.facebook.com/pwgraner?ref=nf

It would be good to make sure this bug is fixed before too many more people experience it.

===

10:56 -!- Irssi: Starting query in 127 with pgraner
10:56 <ccheney> you need to fix your gwibber setup, its spamming facebook about
                every 10 minutes
11:48 <pgraner> Thanks, that piece of **** locked up and I couldn't kill it, I
                had to reboot to make it stop
11:54 <ccheney> lol
11:55 <pgraner> I killed the GUI and I guess the backend didn't die and it was
                still posting after I thought I had killed it. *sigh*
11:55 <ccheney> heh
11:56 <ccheney> probably should file a bug about it too :)
11:56 <ccheney> don't want to see thousands of ubuntu users all having that
                happen on facebook, lol
11:56 <pgraner> Yea just point it at my facebook account
11:57 <pgraner> There needs to be some sort of throttling if the last few
                messages are identical or some shit like that
11:57 <pgraner> yea, I don't know what debugging I can give other than I left
                gwibber running and facebook got spammed
11:57 <pgraner> I'm afraid to start it back up
11:58 <pgraner> I'm already the "facebook spammer"
11:58 <pgraner> heh
11:59 <ccheney> ok

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

12:03 <ccheney> did it repeatedly do that to identi.ca and twitter also?
12:03 <ccheney> i noticed you mentioned something about that on facebook a few
                min ago
12:04 <pgraner> Thanks on only face book I checked and twitter and identi.ca
                look ok

It appears to only be happening with the facebook backend.

[Pete Graner (pgraner)]

Assigning per rickspencer3

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

This doesn't look like it was sent from gwibber. Do you have anything else configured to talk to facebook? Any bridges or friendfeeds to facebook?

I will attach to screenshots to compare. Statuses set by gwibber say "via gwibber"

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

Perhaps you have the facebook plugin for pidgin setup? That idle message looks like something pidgin would set.

[Ken VanDine (ken-vandine)]

I am reasonably confident that this didn't come from gwibber, and most likely actually pidgin.

[Pete Graner (pgraner)]

@Ken, after a late nite of experimenting, I found it did come from the pidgin-facebook chat plugin. Somehow the "Update Facebook status through Pidgin" got checked. So while I'm killing off gwibber its still updating by status. It only stopped after I had rebooted, and I didn't restart it. Thanks when it finally stopped. Not sure how it got ticked, I had been running the plugin since the start of Karmic without issue. I check my other machine that is running it and it was not checked. The only difference between the two boxes is that my netbook (the one with the issue) had a GPU lockup and I had to hardpower off the box.

[Jonathan Davies (jpds)]

Hi Pete,

I did some code investigating and this does not seem to be the default behaviour of the plugin:

libfacebook.c, lines 676 - 680:

    option = purple_account_option_bool_new(
        _("Set Facebook status through Pidgin status"),
        "facebook_set_status_through_pidgin", FALSE);
    prpl_info->protocol_options = g_list_append(
        prpl_info->protocol_options, option);

So something must of ticked the box in the Advanced tab, not sure what could be happening here.

[Pete Graner (pgraner)]

I'm not sure what happened, I've had issues since that hang with corrupt gconf entries, maybe this caused the issue here. I'm closing the bug for now. If it happens again I'll reopen. thanks for the help.

[Gursimran singh (simar)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. If you could test the current Ubuntu stable release(maverick ubuntu 10.10), this would help us a lot.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for pidgin-facebookchat (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]