[JDEV] MSN-t needs a maintainer!

[Bart van Bragt]

Mattias Campe wrote:
>> Personally, I swore off gateways about a year ago, but I know a lot of
>> people feel they need this....
> Same goes here, I also know a lot of people who like to use the MSN 
> gateway (/me swores them off ;) ) and if MSN-groupchat would be possible 
> through MSN I will be able to switch some more people to Jabber :D!

MSN-groupchat is already possible if it's enabled on the server.

BTW I don't "feel" that I need this, I just simply _need_ it :D I'm 
absolutely not in the position to just drop all my MSN and ICQ contacts 
and say 'oh, you want to contact me? Install Jabber'. Well, I can do 
that but I don't want to do that to my contacts. Yet.

IMO Jabber is not yet ready for the majority of Internet users. The 
transports are flaky, file transports are impossible (except when using 
specific jabber clients), clients are still not 100% stable, etc.

Jabber is extremely cool and very usable for geeks like you and me, but 
I don't want to convert my colleagues or girlfriend yet, they'll run 
into too much problems, especially when it comes to using transports.

If Jabber want's to gain a certain momentum then it will need to have 
either 100% reliable transports or a very userfriendly and very stable 
(windows) client that supports all major mediums in a reliable way. For 
instance Trillian.

It was a breeze to convert something like 30 people in my surroundings 
to Trillian, they where fed up with using ICQ and MSN at the same time. 
I just don't want to convert them to Jabber yet. They are going to have 
a bad experience (from the endusers point of view!), they'll start to 
dislike Jabber (too unreliable, too complicated, too geeky) and after 
that it will be quite a challenge to convert them to Jabber or XMMP...

BTW, back on topic.. The main problem with the MSN transport (for me) is 
that it seems to lose connection to the MSN server and it doesn't notify 
the client about that. It doesn't even seem to notice itself. It 
suddenly stops sending me presence notifications etc. Then after I send 
a message to an MSN contact it will tell me that the user is 
unavailable, it'll send me a bunch of presence notifications which make 
my Roster completely out of sync with the real state of the MSN contact 
list (with Psi, haven't tried other clients yet).
I would love to fix these problems myself but I lack both the required 
knowledge (of C, the Jabber protocol, the Jabberd and the MSN protocol) 
and the time. Too busy with developing phpBB 2.2 :D

It would be great if someone could take up this project which has been 
silent for almost a year now. It will give you ethernal fame :D

-- 
Bart van Bragt
"Take my advice, I don't use it anyway."