pidgin privacy please is a pidgin plugin to stop spammers from annoying you.
It offers the following features:
- Block individual users
- Auto-reply to blocked messages
- Block messages from people who are not on your contact list (with an optional auto-reply)
- Block messages using regular expressions, either against the message sender, the message content, or both
- Suppress repeated/all authorization requests
- Suppress OSCAR (ICQ/AIM) authorization requests
- Automatically show user info on authorization requests
- Block jabber headline messages (eg. alerts from the MSN transport)
- Block AOL system messages
- Challenge-response bot-check (see below)
Auto-reply on blocked messages
You can have an auto-reply message sent to people whose messages have been blocked to prevent accidentally blocked messages from disappearing unnoticed.
Messages from unknown people
You can block any messages from people who are not on your contact list and optionally have an auto-reply sent, telling them to request your authorization first. Just check the corresponding options in the configuration dialog.
Authorization requests
For protocols where the user name does not tell you anything about the actual person behind it (eg. ICQ) there is also an option to have the user information pop-up automatically shown whenever somebody asks for your authorization.
Or, if you already have all the friends you need, you can also have all authorization requests rejected automatically (note that, depending on the protocol, you might still be asked for a reason for rejecting).
Bot check
To block spam-bots, you can have pidgin-privacy-please ask a simple question whenever somebody starts a conversation. If they send the right answer, they will be allowed to talk to you. Note that the right answer may be surrounded by other text, so if the right answer is "foo", and they write "i guess it's foo or bar" that's fine, so don't make the answer too short (eg. a simple character like 'a' is a bad choice).
Also, be aware that using this feature might cause all kinds of strange and devastating side-effects if you already use another plugin with similar functionality such as Bot Sentry.
I've been sent here by the Pidgin developers, who reckon that anti-spim is not part of their remit. I think they're wrong, but...
Suggestion: The simples and most effective way to block spim would be to disallow messages with a URL from an unknown contact. That would stop every one I have received in some years now.
Can you do this?
I agree about blocking AUTH messages containing a URL, since there is no reason why an authorization request should contain a URL. I receive many spam AUTH requests in ICQ and not in Jabber, so it would be nice to be able to block either ALL ICQ authorization requests or better still, only those that contain URL's or are in character sets that I do not use (Cyrillic or Chinese, Japanese, etc).
How does the "Block individual users" feature work? I can't see an interface to do that in the plugin configuration, and I sought out this plugin in the first place because the built-in blocking feature of Pidgin doesn't actually block messages - it just hides your status from the blocked user. I want Pidgin to ignore all messages from a single username on AIM. Can I do that with this plugin? Any help is appreciated.
Blocking requests with a URL in them is currently not possible because the plugin never sees the request message. A bug about this has been filed at http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/8690
The ability to block individual users has been removed from the plugin because pidgin can now handle that. Go to "tools -> privacy", select "Block only the users below" and add your users there.
Block individual users should be added back in. Pidgin does not have this capability, or at least it doesnt work properly. As the user described above, it only hides your status, but doesnt actually block the message.
I've been scouring the net for something to block messages from "AOL System Msg" as the built in pidgin functionality does not do this.
Okay, I created a feature request to keep track of this (http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-privacy-please/issues/detail?id=6).
please dont remove ability to block individual user because if we using pidgin, we have to remove the user from contact list. but using this plugin we can simply 'ignore' the message
Don't worry, the feature has been re-added and won't go anywhere. :)
Is/will it be possible to use Privacy Please with Finch?
Hi!
Currently it's not possible to use the plugin with Finch, but I thought about it. It's not currently a top-priority project of mine but seeing that there's interest, I am going to try and implement it at some point.
Also, please don't use the comment function for bug reports or feature requests, use the issue tracker instead - makes it easier for me to keep track of things :)
Does this send a bot check on authorization responses?
How do I use the "suppress repeated authorization requests" feature? I've installed the plugin and checked the option to suppress repeated authorization requests (a month ago). I still get daily requests from the same three ICQ users (bots).
The challenge/response bot check -- is that applied to all users, or just those not already on my contact list? The readme makes it sound like it'll apply to everyone. It'd be nice to have an option to skip the bot-check for people on my contact list, like pidgin-bs does.
@crhal: Since version 0.6.4 the bot check is only applied to people who are not on your contact list.
@sumeru: You are probably a a victim of issue #2 which will be fixed once pidgin 2.8.0 is released.
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-liboscar-nospam/
Hi your software doesn't really work, even tho I set it to "Only let users on my buddy list contact me", later Privacy Please resets it to "Only block the users below" resulting in me still getting loads of random spam Make a fix