Shoutbox

Hi everybody
Sorry for my broken english, i'm french...

I would like to know if a plug in exists. This plug in permit to vien if our contact are really offline or if they are in appear offline status?

Thank you

As soon as ...

No there is no real plugin that can do this in a one way system.

The one's that claim they can are actually spyware. The Messenger Network does not transmit information to contacts if the contact appears offline, therefore you cannot detect it.

It's quite unfortunate actually.

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Originally posted by Delphi Thunderbolt
It's quite unfortunate actually.

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Actually I am glad that it is the way it is. When I set myself to offline, I don't want people start to message me or find out if I am truely offline or not; aka privacy.

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Originally posted by CookieRevised
Actually I am glad that it is the way it is. When I set myself to offline, I don't want people start to message me or find out if I am truely offline or not; aka privacy.

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And if there was a way you could see if someone is Appearing Offline or is really offline, then what would be the point of the Appear Offline option after all?

Next time, try to search before you ask something. Thanks.

That too, but a two-tier system would be acceptable, (e.g. To find out if other people are appearing offline, they need to have the plugin as well as you, and you can't configure it to hide you.)

What goes around, comes around.

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Originally posted by Delphi Thunderbolt
That too, but a two-tier system would be acceptable, (e.g. To find out if other people are appearing offline, they need to have the plugin as well as you, and you can't configure it to hide you.)

What goes around, comes around.

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Yeah, that could be coded i think if two persons has the plug-in installed ... Cause the Messenger.MyStatus function we can reconize if it is really Offline or if the status has been set to "Appear Offline" ...

quote:

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Originally posted by Delphi Thunderbolt
That too, but a two-tier system would be acceptable, (e.g. To find out if other people are appearing offline, they need to have the plugin as well as you, and you can't configure it to hide you.)

What goes around, comes around.

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Originally posted by Yil2201
Yeah, that could be coded i think if two persons has the plug-in installed ... Cause the Messenger.MyStatus function we can reconize if it is really Offline or if the status has been set to "Appear Offline" ...

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Actually such a system is useless and/or wont work.



If you think about it: say you install such a plugin. How is this plugin going to tell your contact you're not offline? Or how are you going to know if your contact (who also has that plugin) is truely offline or not? Probably by sending a packet to your IP address via some custom port.

In other words, to know if your contact is offline or not, you must reveal yourself to be actually online (since you send something to the contact). This also means that you will be sending these packets to everybody on your contactlist and as an effect actually reveal yourself to everybody who whish to know that you're actually online (analogy: open session notifiers), making the appear offline status totally useless; you actually are better of setting your status online and don't bother with the rest.

Now you can say, ok, but what if I don't send the packets to everybody so I'm not exposed, but I rather catch the incomming packets from my contacts and only then send mine so we both know we are actually online? This wont work, as in this case the plugin of your contact will do exactly the same and thus nothing at all will be send.

Looking at it from a different POV, what if MS implemented something like this directly into Messenger? Well, it would be exactly the same: either the packets are send to everybody and the "appear offline" as we know it will become totally useless, or either no packets are send and the system wont work...

So, however you turn and twist this around, such a plugin is either totally useless or it wont work at all, not even when both you and your contact has it...


The only "usefullness" of such a plugin could be to inform a specific contact what your real status is (eg: your good friend) so he/she could always know if you are logged in or not while all the other contacts only see your status as it is (thus you only would send out that packet to that specific IP address and not to all other contacts). But it wont work as a general online checker at all.

You could probably code a custom online server, which a plugin connects to and tells that server what your real status is, and only specified email addresses can then connect to the server with their plugin to see you.

In other words, you'd tell the plugin to upload your real status to the server, you'd set the emails you want to be to see you, and if they install the plugin they can ask the plugin to see if you are on the server, if you are, what status are you.

This would require a good webserver so that everyone could use it, and probably quite a bit of server and client side code. As well, to see your real status they would need this.

are you really that paranoid that you think people are in apper offline just because they don't want to talk to you?
and if they are, why force them to talk to you if they don't want to?

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Originally posted by NiteMare
are you really that paranoid that you think people are in apper offline just because they don't want to talk to you?
and if they are, why force them to talk to you if they don't want to?

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Quite franky, I really don't give two stuffs if someone on my MSN contact list doesn't want to talk to me. But it's a useful concept rather than blocking everyone else. Offline (Both offline and appear offline) Messaging has overcome this a little, but not by much.

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Originally posted by Chromokid
You could probably code a custom online server, which a plugin connects to and tells that server what your real status is, and only specified email addresses can then connect to the server with their plugin to see you.

In other words, you'd tell the plugin to upload your real status to the server, you'd set the emails you want to be to see you, and if they install the plugin they can ask the plugin to see if you are on the server, if you are, what status are you.

This would require a good webserver so that everyone could use it, and probably quite a bit of server and client side code. As well, to see your real status they would need this.

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You would need a pretty good server to do this. Not so much one with a good CPU, I'd imagine if you kept the code clean it wouldn't consume that many cycles, but memory is an issue.
My websever is a kick ass one, but it's clustered and the company doesn't allow dedicated processes running.