Nicknames, unless something has changed, do in fact stick with the contacts. The part that doesn’t work right now is new contacts that don’t yet have a nickname. That is an open JIRA issue at the moment and to be fixed when I have some time to get to it. =) See GATE-49
As for the groups, groups are supported and work correctly for me. There is, however, an odd issue with adding contacts not picking up their new groups. (I think, sometimes I see it, sometimes I don’t)
Auth requests are generally crappy. notz did some good work helping me to fix them up but there’s a lot more that could be done.
What subscription request for each ICQ contact are you talking about? XMPP subscription requests? The only ones I’ve ever seen and purposely trigger are the ones that are when someone adds you, which are proper and let the XMPP user know that the event occurred. If you are referring to the ICQ users getting add requests … that’s odd. I haven’t been able to duplicate that. I’ve been using a real ICQ client to test with, multiple versions, and the illustrious gaim/pidgin.
The first priority was to get adding actually working properly. 'cause it sucks a lot if you add someone and they don’t stick. But yes, it would be better to handle the ICQ adds in the “silly ICQ dance” method of:
client -> icq: add user to SSI
icq -> client: no no this person hasn’t authed you
client -> icq: fine then, here’s an auth request
… time passes, user on other end hopefully accepts …
icq -> client: you were authed
client -> icq: great, put them in my roster
icq -> client: done
See GATE-360
BTW, what exactly is the vcard step accomplishing? The IM Gateway plugin doesn’t support vcards yet and returns a failure. See GATE-42 Generally I don’t try to second guess my users, that leads to more problems than it solves. If someone doesn’t -want- a nickname set then I shouldn’t prevent them from doing that, so that’s the fight i face when trying to determine whether to use just the nickname or the full name or whatever. =)