[JDEV] Promiscuous presence for user communities (with patch)

[Richard Dobson]

> As to making changes to the Jabber protocol, I don't understand all the
> concern. I agree that it is always best to try to work within a protocol,
> but I thought that part of the point of open source software is that you
> could modify it "willy nilly" to meet your own needs. Generally not
advised,
> but sometimes the only option. I don't think that Steven posted this as a
> protocol change, but simply as a solution to this problem for other people
> like myself trying to do the same thing.

The point I think he was trying to make was that some of the suggested best
solutions were infact potensially dangerous to the rest of the community
because they broke the existing protocol rather than using extablished
methods of extension that would not have been any real problem.

e.g.

<presence type="promiscuous"/>

This breaks existing protocol and could cause problems if they come into
contact with existing or future compliant implementations.

<presence>
    <promiscuous xmlns="http://yourwebsite.com/jabber/promiscuous"/>
</presence>

Whereas this uses the standard method of protocol extension and should not
cause any problems when coming into contact with standard compliant
implementations.

I think that the main problem is the seeming lack of caring and "willy
nilly" approach that was used with creating the modification, which could
cause problems for the greater Jabber community as a whole. If you work with
us not against us I doubt you will have any problems and more importantly
not cause the rest of us problems that we have to then clean up.

Richard