Does anybody know how to import “real” names ? I.e. in ICQ when you connect via ICQ transport you do not receive nicknames - only ICQ UINs.
Is there a solution?
Nicknames would only come across if the protocol stores that on their server. Generally this is a function of the client. Yahoo has started supporting this via their web client. Set the nicknames there and they may follow.
This makes sense… So the Jabber side clients list is noy synchronised with IM (i.e ICQ) server? There is no way to add a contact to the legacy server contact list?
Actually it very much is. The IM Gateway plugin loads your legacy contact list and “converts it” into a piece of your XMPP roster.
There are a number of reasons why the nicknames/full names aren’t showing up though. First a short bit of info about the OSCAR contact list. It contains a number of fields. One of those fields is an “alias”, which is effectively “what you want to label this person as”. Like if I wanted to label myself as “Daniel Henninger” I could do that.
With a standard ICQ client, if you recall, you first search for the user. This search looks up the full name and nickname of the person and temporarily stores it. When you actually add the person, it adds them with the alias of the nickname pulled from that search. Clients that don’t abide by the “search then add” (in other words, all of them beyond true ICQ clients) either don’t bother with the alias, or do something else.
So what is that something else? The search you are seeing is a “short info” search in ICQ. You look up a uin and get their first name, last name, nickname … and something else. Forget what it is. So a client adding an ICQ contact can simply make this query and then set the alias accordingly.
Many clients don’t bother setting the alias. Instead they just store what they found for the nickname locally and move on.
So what can the IM Gateway plugin do about this? Well, for one thing, upon syncing your roster with ICQ, it can look for any uin’s that don’t have aliases or their alias matches their uin and it can then look up the appropriate nickname. Same could go during an add, do a quick lookup. Why isn’t the IM Gateway plugin doing this? I haven’t successfully gotten it to work yet. I need to do some tweaking of joscar to make it do a proper short info lookup and get back good information. Though someone submitted a great way to tackle it, so I think it’s just a matter of putting the code in place at this point.