Comment 26 for bug 452067

This bug is not a duplicate of bug 550824. These are two very different issues. Bug 550824 is related to the 'Chat Status' change options becoming disabled (greyed out) after the user changes uses the Me Menu to change his Chat Status to offline. It is a simple usability bug and has been fixed for Natty I believe. This Bug (452067), however, is related to the 'Chat Status' options being disabled (greyed out) when the user logs in and there is no apparent way to make those options enabled using the Me Menu. This is a much bigger issue as the user must instead somehow know that he must launch the empathy application to get these options enabled and get to work (that's no good for new users, I was left confused when I joined Linux @ Ubuntu 10.04 ).

Expected Result for this Bug Report:
- Once the user logs in, he should be able to change his 'Chat Status' from Offline to any of the other available options using the Me Menu WITHOUT having to first launch Empathy.

As mentioned by one of the earlier posters here, invoking this change of status probably shouldn't launch the Contact List. The option "Show Contact List" should also be added to the Me Menu. I have submitted a Bug Report 763266 for that but it is yet to be triaged (https://bugs.launchpad.net/indicator-me/+bug/763266).

It disappoints me that, after 12 months of using Linux and Ubuntu, this issue which has really annoyed me since day 1 still hasn't been worked on and yet this Bug has been reported all the way back in October 2009 and has since been marked as a duplicate.