quote:
Originally posted by ArielFAF
have activated the option "Show contacts as Idle instead of Away when appropiate" and my question 
is how much time lapses since the contact is idle until your state appears in my msn?
There is no fixed time. it depends on what the contact has set it to, as well as other things. Same goes for your own idle status...
Some people will become idle after 1 minute, some people after 99 minutes,... or whatever...
Notes:
- the Idle status is something that is send to you automatically, it is not requested or anything. It is just another, but undocumented, status in Messenger (hence no invasion of privacy either if someone want to say something about it)...
- If someone is "Away" (instead of "Idle") it doesn't automatically mean he is at his PC; The use of the Idle status can be disabled, hence you never know for sure if someone is Away he truely is away or not...
- If someone is "Idle" (instead of "Away") it doesn't automatically mean he is not at his PC; The Idle status can be invoked and even forced by addons like Messenger Discovery X (And can even be set in Windows Live Messenger to be signed in with if you know how
problem is that it will jump to Away since the PC will detect you're active as soon as you have been signed in since you pressed the sign in button).
- The "Idle" status depends on your MSN Messenger setting: "Show me as away when I'm inactive for x minutes". If you didn't tick that feature, then you will never be in "Idle". Hence you still can be truely away when you set your status to "Away".
- Thus it is only after x minutes of inactivity that your status will be set to "Idle", and only if you have that option ticked.
- Inactivity also means no touching of the mouse.
- It is possible that your Messenger will never switch to Idle, eventhough you have set it todo so. This has todo with the fact that certain programs on your PC can prevent the PC from detecting that the system is idle/not in use.
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