"No login notifications" should imply "no login indicators"

[Conscious User]

Binary package hint: empathy

Currently, if I uncheck the option for receiving notification bubbles when an user appears online, I do not receive the bubbles but entries in the indicator-applet keep appearing for a brief period. I think it's safe to assume that if the user does not want login notifications, he does not want login indicators either.

I often find myself opening the applet (due to another reason, for example new email), seeing an entry for someone who just joined there and thinking "huh? did he send me a message and I missed the notification?" just to meet an empty conversation window when I click the person's name.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Dec 11 19:26:19 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: empathy 2.28.1.1-0ubuntu1
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-16.53-generic
SourcePackage: empathy
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-16-generic x86_64

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, not wanting things to go in your screen is different than not wanting to queue messages though, not sure I agree with the rational there

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

Sebastien, but *should* login indicators be considered queued messages?
By design, they stay in the applet only for a brief period. Therefore, they are,
from what I could understand, a tool for quick reaction.

When you disable notifications, you are disabling the very thing you are
supposed to react to, because login indicators do not change the applet
icon to draw attention (and rightfully so, they are not that important).

In other words, when you disable login notifications, the only way to use
the login indicators is to be lucky and click on the applet between the
time it appeared and the time it disappears. If you don't receive IMs and
mail very often, this is unlikely to happen and, when it happens, I
believe it can confuse the user like I described in the report.

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

I had an interesting experience with this bug yesterday and
feel it is relevant to mention. A friend once tried to talk to
me via Empathy, but I wasn't at the computer at the time
and didn't return before he eventually went offline. I then
turned off the computer in a rush without verifying the
indicator-applet, effectively losing his message.

(the last part is at least what I think it happened, judging
by the message timestamp)

When I was using the computer again later, I got bitten
by the bug: I clicked on the applet because of a new
Gwibber entry and was fooled by an entry that was there
just because this same friend had just logged in. So
I clicked on the indicator.

Now comes the funny part: because of Empathy logging,
when I opened the conversation window from the
indicator, the last message was his "hello" from
BEFORE, and thus the fooling was complete. The friend
promptly received a "hello" from me as a reply from a
message he had sent hours before. :)

I only understood what happened when I actually looked
at the message timestamp.

So, long story short: this bug and Empathy logging is a
nasty combination.

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

The current situation is probably easy to fix, as it just involves wrapping the call of "empathy_indicator_manager_add_login_indicator" in source file empathy-main-window.c inside an if clause that reads the user configuration for whether he wants login notifications or not.

As it passes the "trivial to fix" condition, I'm assigning this also to the papercuts project.

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

As I proposed in Bug #440068, I'm removing the duplicate status of this bug, as #440068 could be partitioned in two issues, one of them being the one reported here. I'm also confirming it.

[Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak)]

With users constantly going online and offline, the value of the indicator applet's "new message" icon is completely nullified, because it's just always on.

Big impact on the indicator's usability.

[Conscious User (conscioususer)]

I just realized that this bug is a duplicate of Bug #533857 and is already fixed in Lucid.