Shoutbox

In my experience when you block someone you don’t receive any offline messages from them and even though you might not want to speak to them at that point, you might also not want to miss anything from them...

The reason this is requested so often is because sometimes people want the full functionality of using messenger while appearing online with some contacts (web, games etc), they may not want to be interrupted by others even though they still want to be able to receive messages from them...   

Yes you can block contacts temporarily but then you won’t receive any offline messages or you can appear offline and receive messages but then you can’t use all of messenger’s functions with the people you are speaking to because you are appearing offline...

Stuffplug to my understanding has a feature that allows you to talk to blocked contacts, but they can’t talk to you (I think). If you ask me it should work the other way around because if I wanted to talk to someone I would, no need to have them blocked, on the other hand if I could block contacts temporarily and still receive their offline messages that would be a lot more useful...

Appearing offline to some contacts and online to others would be great but I’m not sure if it’s possible – then again I’m not a programmer so I’ll leave it up to those who are to make that call...