pidgin-facebookchat doesn't work with new protocol

[David Mandelberg]

Binary package hint: pidgin-facebookchat

Pidgin-facebookchat stopped working yesterday, apparently because of changes Facebook made to the chat protocol. The new upstream version 1.62 is supposed to support the new protocol.

Upstream bug: http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/issues/detail?id=638
"Plugin will not work on any account, every time i try to login it says
"account disconnected. Could not retrieve buddy list." It does this for any
account i try to login with. It only started happening today, worked
flawlessly before. Any ideas?"

Changelog: http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/wiki/Changelog

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 9.10
Release: 9.10
$ apt-cache policy pidgin-facebookchat
pidgin-facebookchat:
  Installed: 1.60-1.1
  Candidate: 1.60-1.1
  Version table:
 *** 1.60-1.1 0
        500 http://mirror.anl.gov karmic/universe Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Derek Kaye (kayedj)]

Confirmed here. Stopped working yesterday.

[influencd (charlie-de-courcy)]

This is due to a change in facebook protocol.

It is described and fixed with the latest plugin (v1.62) detailed here:
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/issues/detail?id=638

and available for download here:
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-facebookchat/downloads/list

Enjoy.

inf

[Jonathan Davies (jpds)]

This is now pending on a sync from the new Debian package (bug #474808).

[Jonathan Davies (jpds)]

Synced in Karmic.

[Stefan Hammer (j-4-deactivatedaccount)]

the problem occurs again. updating to 1.64 solves the problem!
should i open a new bug, or can you sync the version this way too?

[Out_Cold (b-v-barton-hotmail)]

with the new chat yet again, facebook chat is using XMPP and this package seems obsolete.

[BigBrownChunx (eion)]

I'm currently forking the libpurple XMPP protocol to use the new Facebook
login mechanism as well as filling in the parts of Facebook's XMPP
implementation that are missing, such as buddy list management, status
messages and that sort of thing.

So, while it may seem obsolete, there are still useful features that their
XMPP method can't do, and there are plans to update the plugin so would
probably be worth keeping the package in-tree for a bit longer.