I’ve done a fair bit of searching before posting. I want to setup a more google type chat server were users join and have to add users to friends list. So I have a two questions.
Question 1:
Is there any way to shorten a person’s username? I having been trying to IM random people connected to my server and up until a short bit ago I thought that was going to be impossible. I setup a group and a rost and everyone showed up. So I removed the roster and left the name up on my phone and IM’d myself again. I discovered the username was really log and horrible. is there anywa to clean it up. See picture below.
This is how xmpp works. If a user is unknown, you see his full username (Full JID: username@server/resource). This is required to identify users. In Pidgin you can go in the chat window to Conversation menu, press Add and specify an alias for this person and next it will show that alias in the chat window instead of the username. Same will be when searching and adding new contacts manually (you have to specify aliases for them). Another way is to create users on the server and specify Name for every user, then add them to a group, share that group with All or selected groups and they will show up with specified names, not usernames, on the rosters of other users.
For your own name you will have to go to Accounts menu in Pidgin > select your account > Edit Account and set the Local Alias.
I was able to actually figure it out myself. I had to restart the service on my server for Openfire and it started working as intended. Everything else fell into place. Thank you for response.
