Yes, I agree.  Unfortunately I rushed out v1.60 to fix the crashes and other 
problems before we added an option to disable FB groups.

It's also strange because Facebook Groups have a many-to-many relationship (i.e. one
contact can be in multiple groups), whereas pidgin only has a one-to-many
relationship in its groups (one group can hold many people, but people can only be in
one group). Though I do have the same groups in Pidgin as Facebook, I have more
friend lists in Facebook.

With 100s of friends who I've sorted into various places, having the entire buddy
list overwritten has once more forced me to wait for the next fix when things are
working properly (w/o crashes, and without rewriting my whole buddy list organization
[including metacontacts]). 

That said, your response on fixing the crash issues is appreciated.

Please enable an option to disable Facebook groups.  Also, when this is implemented, 
does this mean we need to manually remove all the groups that the plugin created in 
1.60?

I'm reverting from 1.6 to 1.54 because "Facebook groups/friend lists" is really
cluttering my Pidgin contact list.
I also have friends in multiple groups.

I too would like a toggle for Facebook groups.

I use "groups" in both Pidgin and Facebook, but my organization is different on each 
one.  Please enable an option to disable Facebook friend lists.

One of the limitations of 1.60 is that it will reset any customizations you might have 
done.  Post 1.60, all changes you make will be reflected in Facebook.

It is highly unlikely we will add an option to disable friend lists.  More bugs will be 
created in that situation.

Now for specific responses:

hegemonwiggin: There is no good workaround for your situation, and I understand how frustrating 
that probably is.  The reset will happen this time, and this time only.  We cannot prevent the 
reset from happening.  There is a possible fix, where you can preemptively create the groups 
using the website and assigned friends to appropriate groups first.

jens.hauser: If you move them back to General, yes there will be a group called "General" in 
Facebook.  This should not impact your Facebook experience severely though.  Your metacontacts 
will be moved into the Facebook group.  However, you can prevent this from happening by creating 
a General list in Facebook and adding all your friends to it.

yanghatespam, DannyFritz, and LaughLax: we may/may not add an option.  One of the problems with 
having an option is that a large number of bugs will probably be created.  It can't be done both 
ways easily.

@pidgin: I had a backup of my pidgin configs from before installing 1.60 and I tried
to just copy over the old blist file, but it got wiped over again. 

Additionally, 1.60 wiped out all of my aliases. And since I had aliased almost
everyone, that is an even more massive pain. (Some of them because they don't use
real names on Facebook, others to add their year of study in; I suppose that could've
been done with further groups, but so long as pidgin has one-to-many group relations,
that's a major pain. 

Any chance that you could make it possible to write to Facebook rather than read
from? i.e. read the groups from blist.xml and assign people to friend lists in
Facebook if they're not already in a friend list with that group name? (and then,
presumably, you'd want to read the friend lists and if someone isn't already in a
group, to create a group based on one of the friend lists to which they belong).

Actually, I really don't get how this works right now; how do you transpose a
many-to-many relation to a many-to-one? If I've a friend who's in 6 Friend Lists, how
do you decide which pidgin group he ends up in?

PS: The fact that this exists at all is still awesome, even if things are breaking at
the moment.

Ah good, the panic's gone...;-) Doesn't seem to be that bad anymore, thanks -erm- Mr 
Developer. I can live with that.

Anyway, I've been thinking about that FB friends lists / Pidgin groups thing. If 
enabled, doesn't it actually break FB lists and/or Pidgin groups of people who do 
not use one or the other feature? Or maybe even of people who do? The only scenario 
in which that feature would be really nice is having the exact same groups in FB and 
Pidgin. And even then, FB buddies belonging to several lists on FB will be 
restricted to only one group in Pidgin (see hegemonwiggin's earlier post here). When 
it comes to that, FB lists and Pidgin groups are simply incompatible. Correct me if 
I'm wrong, I have absolutely no experience with FB's friends lists.

Because it's quite common on Facebook to have hundreds of friends, I strongly 
suggest to implement the option of disabling this feature in order to avoid manual 
editing of hundreds of FB buddies (or, on the other hand, automate the process of 
synchronizing).

Erm, in short: That feature is a blessing for people who use it, but can be 
desastrous for the ones who don't. I can imagine that -apart from introducing new 
bugs- adding a disable button for a brand new feature is somewhat unsatisfying;-) 
But I'd say, the earlier the better!

Keep it up!

@hegemonwiggin

It's actually a many to many relationship.  If you have a friend in 6 friend lists in Facebook, 
that friend will show in six groups in Pidgin.

The code actually writes to Facebook like you suggested.  If you move contacts from one group to 
another, the changes will be reflected in Facebook.

The reason why that doesn't show up when you upgrade to 1.60 is simple:  the code needs to pick 
one version as the "canonical" version.  This is either the server side list or the local Pidgin 
side list.

If we pick server side to be canonical, then any local modifications in Pidgin are wiped out.
If we pick Pidgin to be canonical, then any server modifications are wiped out.

There is a huge con to wiping out server modifications.  Doing so raises the risk of messing up 
privacy settings in Facebook and causing unexpected embarrassment to our plugin's users.  This 
also does not work at all for people installing the plugin for the first time.

The con to wiping out the Pidgin list is the hassle of recreating the organization in Pidgin.  
Fortunately, this is one time only.

So we chose a small hassle over the risk of wiping out privacy settings.

If you're willing to do it, all you need to do is to shuffle all your contacts quickly.  Move 
them to a temporary group and then back to the original group (inside Pidgin).  That will lock in 
the group permanently across all copies of Pidgin and Facebook.com.

 Issue 477  has been merged into this issue.

I know this is just anecdotal, but all the three other people I know IRL who use this 
plugin are, like me, reverting to 1.59 until there's an option to avoid polluting our 
contact lists with Facebook lists.  We implore you to implement this, and we understand 
that it means more work - thank you for everything thus far.

Anecdotal is fine, but we need to know what problems you guys are having.  Why are you 
unwilling to pollute Pidgin with said friend lists?  Are they that incompatible?

Specifically, anecdotes listing out your Pidgin groups, how many users are in each group, 
what % of them are Facebook users.  Add in anecdotes about your friend lists, how you 
organize them, why they're incompatible with Pidgin.  The more concrete examples the better.  
It's hard to research this because, well, friend lists are private info.

We need this info, because as I have emphasized several times already, adding an option is 
difficult and will likely cause a number of additional bugs.

Speaking for myself and not for my friends: I have 30+ different friend lists in 
Facebook, because my list of friends (like many others' lists) numbers in the 
hundreds.  These lists serve several a wide variety of purposes: lists for how I know 
people (groups, etc.), mailing lists, invitation lists, privacy access control lists, 
and so forth; these lists are not helpful in the context of Pidgin/finch.

Furthermore, while I have many friends, a very small subset thereof actually use 
Facebook Chat.  As a result, in Pidgin I end up seeing many groups that contain only 
1 or 2 individuals (and even more noise if I reveal empty groups).

Also, in Pidgin/finch I have one buddy list per IM account, so I used to have a total 
of about 5 buddy lists.  Now that number has grown by nearly an order of magnitude.  
And these lists are (for the reasons stated in the first paragraph) highly orthogonal 
to the classification I use in my Pidgin list.

Because Facebook lists are used as sets and not as partitions, I see a great deal of 
repetition - the same friend may appear in many of my friend lists, which inflates my 
buddy list even more.  It's that much harder to scan my buddy list to see who's 
online, or to type-ahead-search for individuals.

Those are the immediate pain points off the top of my head.

Personally, I just wanted the profile pictures to work again, so I upgraded.  It's
not (to me) such a big deal that I'd revert.  

With you pushing the issue, I probably could do some consolidation on the Facebook
side and the Pidgin side and make it work.  Perhaps it was a knee-jerk reaction to
change?  I'm going to try and see if I can merge them.  What I did like was knowing
that I was talking to them on Facebook, and not a legit IM program (not all my
friends are savvy enough to use Pidgin ;)) - but there are other ways to that.

BUT, the one-to-many is the biggest sticking point.  For me to merge, I'm going to
move people around so that they're only in one group.

P.p.s. I have a group in FB that isn't showing up (one of my friends is on now and
shows up in "other friends" - I went to look for the group she should be in, and the
group's not there).  Is there a limit on number of groups or anything?

 Issue 478  has been merged into this issue.

@yanghatespam and others: For those of you who have groups they don't want to see: what if simply 
added an option to hide certain groups?  Essentially, we would implement the "friend lists" 
button in the web chat interface.

Is that sufficient?

That would be sufficient in conjunction with an All Friends list, and (a nicety) the 
ability to hide all other lists except for the All Friends list.  However, by that 
point, you've essentially implemented the option to use the suggested system of not 
using friend lists at all.

My problem is that I have over 500 friends and sometimes I will have more than 100 of
them online at a single time. It is much easier for me to look at a single list of
alphabetically sorted buddies to see if someone is online than to look through the 15
friends list I have created for use in Facebook for filtering purposes.

One thing I do and I am fairly sure most other Pidgin and multi protocol client users
do is separate your buddies by Protocol. It was like that before with a single
"Facebook" group. That way it fit perfectly into our already existing buddy setups.

I have reverted back to 1.54 (which still works great by the way and makes me happy)
solely because the lists added a lot of anxiety to my buddy list where missing
profile icons is a small bug to me. Before reverting I considered switching to Digsby
even. But alas, Digsby lacks IRC and is bound to Windows.

Could someone compile a Windows 1.59 dll and post it here?

I just came across another flaw in separating groups. It caused a privacy issue with
me when it moved people out of certain groups that I had created for access limiting
purposes. Thus, gave them access to the previously unreachable areas of my profile.

Just installed 1.60 and... am not happy. So as any OSS user I tracked down this issue
to this page :-)

So, the problem:
  * What FB calls "Lists" and what Pidgin calls "Groups" are two different things per
design; trying to match them 1-to-1 is not going to work for some (most?) people.
  * FB is a(n interactive) website, Pidgin is IM client; FB is mainly used for
one-to-many "conversations" (when you publish something), Pidgin is mainly used for
one-to-one conversations (irc is exception, pidgin-facebookchat is NOT).

more details:
  * FB: I use a few LOCation lists like "LOC: Tokyo", "LOC: Japan", "LOC: Bulgaria"
on FB; then I have INterest lists like "IN: photo", "IN: paraglider" and so on;
additionally I have a bunch of unclassified lists (colleagues, that-event). As you
might guess, many "friends" appear on quite a few lists. I use the lists when I want
to send an invite, or see a group of people's latest activities. I generally don't
bother with lists, I look at pictures and names.
  * Pidgin: I have very few groups there to be able to find people for chat. It might
be good to know that John who I want to chat with belongs to these 14 groups, but I
definitely do NOT want to have 14 Johns showing in all the groups! And if I have 5
friends on-line in 10 groups that is 50 on the screen! Although I use 2560x1600
screen, they don't fit (about 30-40 fit in one column).

some background:
  * Lists, sub-lists, groups, sub-groups, directories, labels, trees... these all are
ways to organize "things", let's say contacts for the sake of clarity. With physical
things, say business cards, you have to stick to one way of organizing simply because
it is hard to make a copy of the card; most people either sort them alphabetically
(by name (first or family), or company, or...) or chronologically (in the order they
get them); when the set grows they pack them (cards from 2007, 2008, 2009...; A-C,
D-K, L-N..) somehow, thus creating a rudimentary index. Some "organized" people go
further and stick small post-it-notes (e.g. green for clients, blue for vendors...).
Some even more organized folks might put a dot on the post-it-notes for "important"
contacts.... this can go for quite some levels.
Some "geeks" ditch all the business cards and get the info to `insert favorite app
here` for better handling: they can search by name, company, view lists of names,
select several contacts, edit them together, create new groups, combine groups in
bigger groups, draw connection maps... they don't care how is information stored:
neither the record (name, picture, phone...), nor the organization (lists,
properties, groups).

what we have now (the constraints):
 * cannot tell all (your) lists/groups that a contact belongs to, e.g. show it as
mouse-over pop-up [FB, Pidgin]
 * limited display area, e.g. cannot show all (>50) groups on one screen [Pidgin]
 * no support for multi-level grouping/sub-lists [FB, Pidgin]

what can we do (possible solution):
 * implement enable/disable "Lists in FB" for pidgin-facebookchat: if disabled, let
all FB contacts be read from the server and belong to one group, unless present
elswhere; don't update (=mess) with FB lists, i.e. don't write to the server, unless
specifically requested (e.g. right-click, "move this buddy here on the server"); this
will allow people to add the FB account of a contact to their other (Y!, icq)
accounts and have them classified as one contact belonging to one group.
 
 * additionally, in Pidgin, show all FB lists that this contact belongs to on mouse-over

Finally, just a clarification since I am afraid to mess up: there is an option "Edit
facebook friends from pidgin"... if it is NOT selected, does this mean that server
data will NOT be changed (even if I move people around groups)? If that's the case,
adding "don't show groups" option will be enough; if that is NOT the case, it should
be fixed.

Cheers,
Kalin.

There is unfortunately no 1.59.  1.54 had a serious bug that generated several dozen reports 
in under 10 hours yesterday.  Eion pushed a fix, but released the friend list feature was 
prematurely in the process.

For those of you attached to this issue, we are working on it ASAP.  Please continue to add 
comments about how you would like to see your buddy list organized.

That just caught me out, I went back to 1.54 after reading the comments, thinking it
was a older version not the one I'd just upgraded from that crashed everytime someone
started typing.

I just want it like it was previously, all my FB contacts in a list called Facebook,
not floating around between that and a new group called 'other contacts' at random as
it seemed to be doing.

That's a bug.  Did you have contacts online in both Facebook and Other Contacts at the 
same time?

If comment 27 is at me, then I think the answer is yes.  I have a group, say "Old
Job" (really the name of the company).  A person who's in the "Old Job" list was
showing up in "Other Friends" when she was online, and the "Old Job" list isn't
appearing... there's like 3-4 lists not appearing.  Should I file a new issue?

No I only had online contacts in the 'other contacts' group, but offline in both that
and the Facebook group, the majority of names were still in FB but they seemed to
move from group to group with no pattern I could immediately see, I tried moving them
back to the FB group but they just moved themselves back.

I had Facebook set up with the standard list of everyone, 1 person from that list
also featured in another list with some privacy settings, then there was a third list
that was empty.

This morning I reinstalled 1.6 and after deleting both the lists from in Facebook,
everythings now gone back to normal, all contacts are in the Facebook group on Pidgin.

I really love pidgin-facebook chat and I really appreciate all the work that has been
put into it, but let me just add in and say I really dislike this change. The main
problem for me (and I think one that is shared by many) is that while most (all?)
other services I use pidgin with are entirely for chatting, facebook is not.
Consequently, the groups are formed for different reasons and are not compatible. 

I wanted to say that having an option to hide certain groups would not be sufficient
because I still want to be able to move people around into my pidgin groups, but
prevent them from being moved around in facebook.

I just realized that metacontacts get splitted! That is, the FB part is moved to the 
FB group. That's not okay... I've got a lot of them, especially because many people 
are on FB as well as on some messenger.

I'm still unsure what to do now. Should I create a group "General" on FB (I only 
have "Own status" and "General" in Pidgin) or wait for that "hide" feature..? What 
will happen, if that "hide" feature is enabled and I move the buddies back to 
General? Maybe I better downgrade to 1.54.

Would it be possible to publish a -say- 1.55 with the correct link to the buddy 
icons?

Btw: as much as I appreciate you work, You should inform people before introducing 
such major changes. Or explicitly ask for them to be tested.

I had this idea in my head for a while, but how about an option so that you can
create Pidgin specific groups on Facebook.  They could be called Pidgin - Workers,
Pidgin - Friends etc. or some other naming convention.  The only problem with this is
that it would add clutter to Facebook, come to think of it it's probably not a good
idea, but it's an idea nonetheless.

Please, make facebook lists optional. :)

I will echo the sentiments of many who dislike this change. For me,
pidgin-facebookchat was a godsend because it allowed me to sign into Pidgin and talk
to friends who had AIM and/or Facebook. As such, I liked having a "Facebook" group
created when FB friends signed on, as I could then move them around locally such that
a friend in a group called "High School Friends" on my AIM profile could be nested
with their Facebook ID, taking them out of the "Facebook" group for good. With this
update, all the nesting and organization I had done is gone and changes made by
moving them around in Pidgin are reverted when I sign off and on again. I would vote
to have an option to just "blindly" import Facebook friends regardless of what
Facebook lists they belong to, and then allow us to organize them into our Pidgin
groups without changing anything server side. This would seemingly alleviate any
concerns about privacy settings changing on FB, as well.

Great idea, and the concept partially works for me as I have *some* groups in
Facebook called the same like groups in ICQ and MSN (I was amazed) - but it also has
the big disadvantage that I have many FB buddies in *several* FB groups and I don't
know where to find them at one glance. Actually I want all Facebook buddies back to
appear in ONE group called "Facebook".

So please make the option "Facebook groups" an optional checkbox, so that if it is
unchecked, the plugin behaves *exactly* as it did in 1.54 and before.

A big thank you for your fantastic work. Keep it up. :-)

Well, as many others have mentioned, I severely dislike this new feature and would
like an option to disable it. In the meantime, I went through SVN and compiled r586
after I added the changes for r622 and r620 which seem to be the major changes minus
the lists.

As per your request to ask how our friends lists are set up, in facebook, I have
around 30 lists many of which contain the same people. I have things set up from
Neighbors to Highschool Friends to Co-Workers and a lot of these people are the same
and I use them to send out certain messages, like a mailing list. In pidgin, like
others, I just keep all the protocols in their own groups. I have never been one to
separate groups with people I chat with.

I appreciate your time taken to support this plugin and look forward to a resolution
to this.

Jeremy

If an option is impossible, I believe it would be better to simply remove reference
to friend lists in the plugin, so that you can't read or write to them. There are
semantic differences between Friend Lists and Pidgin Groups, especially with regard
to privacy settings, that it doesn't make sense to let you write to Facebook groups
from Pidgin. And if you can't edit the groups, it wouldn't make much sense to read
them either; I think the plugin would be better if it just ignored groups altogether.

I've also been leery of reorganizing and re-aliasizing all my Facebook friends, which
I fear I need to because there might be more plugin changes that would break that
again; could you give us some indication of how the plugin development, given the
issues raised in this thread, is planned on going?

Thanks!

 Issue 485  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 487  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 489  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 490  has been merged into this issue.

I have about 60 FB groups and over 1000 contacts so pidgin is going nuts with this.
If I could somehow disable FB groups or Create a group called "Facebook" or whatever
and have all the FB groups show up UNDER that subgroup, I could minimize the FB list
until I needed it.

Reverting to my previous 1.53 (since I've just read that 1.54 was even buggier) until
the solution of me.kalin (or similar) gets implemented and there's a positive
reaction around it (= I am not eager to test it myself after the negative experience
I had today with 1.6)

Keep up the good work, guys!
But try to explain better what a new feature means next time.. "Changelog: support
for Facebook lists" can mean so many things..

 Issue 498  has been merged into this issue.

Ok, I'm assuming that the reason a new version has not been released yet is because
you're trying to come up with a good solution to the issue that allows for the option
to include the groups, but in the mean time I'm getting really fed up with the
current plugin, so could you maybe put up one of the older versions or something? Or
could someone else?

mouseclicker all previous version are available for download by clicking the download
tab and changing the dropdown filter to "all versions."  Thanks again for all your
hard work Pidgin-Facebook plugin guys!  I sure appreciate all your work, I get a
sweet plugin for no effort on my part, and that makes me happy!

 Issue 503  has been merged into this issue.

+1 for adding an option to show all facebook contacts in one single group named
"facebook".

This change was integrated into the Adium 1.4.b8 which I just installed. It
completely broke the combined contacts which I had setup previously as well creating
clutter with the group. If a facebook contact is combined with another contact then
it shouldn't be dragged into the facebook list. I think that's the right protocol. If
as a user I've taken the time to move a contact to another group or merged it with
another contact, than the facebook lists shouldn't show that contact. This is really
a subset of the previous behaviour where a contact showed up in the "Facebook" group
unless they had already been moved to another group.

I really don't want to sync my IM groups with my Facebook groups. They are really
separate things and provide different information to me.

I've started working on this and it currently needs testing.  If you can compile 
from svn, please give it a try.  There is a new option in the advanced settings to 
turn off the groups/friends list stuff

I had switched back to 1.54. I installed the svn and changed the advanced setting
turn off groups before logging in to facebook and nothing changed (which is good).
The people I had put into groups seem to have stayed there and I was able to send and
receive messages as normal. Thanks!

mind to upload a windows binary of the svn version to help testing? tried to build
from svn but no success, doesn't seem to be trivial. thanks!

I've read a lot of this discussion but.. 
Is there any chance that an option to disable the facebook groups and add only ONE
group like "Facebook" in pidgin will be added ?

Thanks

baptiste33, Yes there is an option for it in svn.  If anyone feels like testing it, 
that would be great.

svn only on windows einrobb right? can u upload a windows version - i will be more
than happy to beta test it!

mpu...@gmail.com, sure.  Attached.

libfacebook-debug.dll 239 KB   Download

Hello. I did test the SVN version on a couple of Linux machines in the past few days.
It seems to work well.

I've tested with the windows version in the comment 56 and there is a major issue :
when I first connect, pidgin have registered the facebook friend list and there is
now way to merge every contacts in a specific group such as "Facebook"

I just got r653 installed last night and when I came back today, I had a couple of
messages. None of them had the name associated with the message (or the picture, but
I can't remember if that showed up before) so they only showed the account number
(which needless to say isn't very helpful. The groups seem to work fine. I disabled
the account prior to upgrading and after upgrading went into the account and disabled
the group feature and then connected.

Also as a side note (possibly related), I have the psychic plugin enabled for pidgin
and I had 3 chats open saying "You feel a disturbance in the force", it then shows
the person is typing and it never goes away. I upgraded due to the messages repeating
themselves error, but as I can't see who I am talking with, I may have to downgrade
again.

But hey, at least we are getting somewhere. If you need more tests done let me know.

I just realized anytime a new message comes in it actually opens a new tab with a
different "account number" including when I send a message back. If I send a message
back it will still show in my chat window, but will still open a new window and put
that message there as well.

Some examples of account numbers:
641903684581955260
643083152017239757
595836346401396412
13078206140 (not sure why this one was shorter than the rest)
622794757480980877

I will leave this on for a bit longer to do any testing you may need done, but I am
going to have to revert back soon.

The buddies and groups seem to be working for me the way I want them to in the
windows svn version posted above.

I wanted the groups I set up in Pidgin to be separate from any group associations on
Facebook. Changes to one set should have no effect to the other set. That seems to be
the way it's working now, so I am happy with that.

However, pidgin crashes frequently with this svn. Anytime I try to open a new IM
window with a facebook contact, it crashes immediately. I think it may be crashing
when ppl try to initiate chat with me, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

Confirm the above poster. Testing with a friend on also using the plugin, a message
sent from my client to his would crash both copies of Pidgin and vice versa. (Pidgin
2.6.1 on Vista/XP) The group/friend lists feature works properly again though (all
contacts appear in the Facebook group.)

agreed to #64 .. crashing constantly when initiating a chat!

The new version of facebook for pidgin automatically puts all my "friends" into
different groups of facebook, and revert back to that default whenever I try to
change it.
This is the most annoying thing ever. I'd rather live with occasional crashes than
constant annoyance like this. 

Yep there should be an option to force all fbk contacts to be in a group called
"Facebook" (or else)

thecalbear, baptiste33, as of v1.61 there is already an option to ignore the 
Facebook friends lists, and to revert to the old behavior of putting everyone into a 
'Facebook' group in Pidgin