Ubuntu

Send message to all contacts?

Asked by l33ting disorder

Hi,

One feature that seems to be present in almost every Multi-Protocol IM client is the ability to right-click on a group container and have an option to send a message to every contact within the group.

I haven't found such a feature in pidgin. Am I just not looking in the right place, or is pidgin currently lacking this feature?

If the latter, let this be a suggestion for that INCREDIBLY useful function to be added to the next pidgin version! :)

What would be ideal would be an option in the context menu to send to all contacts within a given group and to also have an option somewhere (maybe in the accounts menu) to send a message to EVERY contact, regardless of which group they've been sorted into.

Apart from that, thanks to the dev team for making such an amazingly awesome cross-platform IM client! Woots all around!

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Richard Laager (rlaager) said : 		#1

Pidgin has no such feature. It's not going to be added because of the potential for abuse. Look around for third-party plugins.

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l33ting disorder (omni-networksense) said : 		#2

I dunno man, that sounds like a cop-out to me.

A) spammers don't use client software, they use scripts and custom spamming software.

B) to try to use pidgin for spam would just be ridiculous. With the amount of work you'd have to do to replicate the effectiveness of 5 minutes in a spam tool, you'd be better off just getting a job at mcdonald's. (trust me, I have a diploma in network security so I know the common spam methods)

C) if someone DID want to resort to using client software for spamming purposes, they'd just use one of the many many windows clients that do have a send-to-all feature.

Really, speaking as a network security specialist, I can tell you that you don't have to worry about spammers abusing a send-to-all feature in an end-user client like Pidgin because spammers already have MUCH more efficient tools available. It would be like a commercial fisherman selling his trawling boat and investing in a whittled stick to spear-fish with. ;)

Revision history for this message
l33ting disorder (omni-networksense) said : 		#3

Not that I'm comparing Pidgin to a whittled stick... Pidgin is freakin awesome! :)

I just wish I could tell all my friends about an upcoming event without having to manually open a conversation window for every single contact, paste the message into each, and close each and every one of them!

Revision history for this message
Ben Bridts (band-b) said : 		#4

I'm posting this to:
A) close to question (the question is answered i think, even if you don't like the answer)
B) tell you that potential abuse != spam. Potential means someone could use it (even though you say it's unlikely -and you may be right- they still could). And abuse isn't only done by 'professional' spammers. If my grandma decides to forward a chain-letter using IM, I consider it abuse.
C) mention the broadcast plugin of the purple PluginPack. But you'll have to use an older version[1] of the pluginpack, since it isn't included anymore in the newer releases[2]

[1] http://downloads.guifications.org/plugins/Plugin%20Pack%20Archive/
[2] http://plugins.guifications.org/trac/wiki/broadcast

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