Everything works fine, given that this is a private network, and that there’'s no outside use of Gaim. All users see all other users, and everybody is automatically inserted into a single group when they are added as a new user. This means that each Buddy List in Gaim is populated with the entire list of characters.
However, I have some people that would a) prefer to stay out of everyone else’'s buddy list, or b) be selectively seen by a particular group (say, department managers, instead of by warehouse employees). What is an effective way to accomplish this?
The first thought I came up with said to make different groups, and have some people added to different groups. But then I ended up with multiple appearances of the same user in each different group, which became very confusing to end users.
I guess some pointers on group distribution would be very helpful. Thanks!
Well, personally i cant think of any solution. But maybe you should explain (example) a bit more what you want to achieve?
If you want some people to be in more than one group so it’'s natural they will appear more than once. But, e.g in Miranda when you disable groups it doenst show same contacts more than once. But then you dont have groups.
Frank works in IT. Helen works in HR. Their work requires that they listen to employees, but IM puts employees just a little too accessible. So they’'d like to back up a step.
At present, there are 40 accounts, and they’'re all in a single group named EVERYONE. Any new user account that is created is automatically entered into EVERYONE.
That means Frank and Helen are available to anybody else. This is undesirable to them; remember, they want a low profile. I could remove them from EVERYONE, and add them to a group called HIDDEN. But now they won’'t make contact with anybody, unless I add people to HIDDEN.
What I would like to suggest is that my recluses could be put in a HIDDEN group, and maybe create a group for the executive management called EXECS. Then allow HIDDEN to be seen by EXECS, but not by EVERYONE.
I may be confusing myself with this, too, because I don’‘t properly understand group makeup or architecture, and there’'s not a helpfile other than the forum.
it seems that Fastpath would be a solution, but maybe you need only 5% of the options you would get with Fastpath.
Without Fastpath using a non-existing Wifi-plugin:
Actually nobody needs to know whether Helen is online or not, if one want’‘s to send her a message it would be a great idea to search for a group “HR” and add it for the rest of the day. So you’'d see all HR members like Helen. Restarting Spark should remove the group, or there may be a remove button.
All HR employees may see a reverse “HR” group which shows the users who use the “HR” group.
so EVERYONE should see EXECS and contact HIDDEN through them?
group EVERYONE:
Show group in all users’’ rosters.
group EXECS:
Show group in all users’’ rosters.
group HIDDEN:
Show group to members’’ rosters of these groups:
EXECS
But i must be missing something, because that setup is not productive. It’'s sometime hard to investigate problems in direct chat, and with such setup the time would double or more. And if someone from group HIDDEN tries to contact one in EVERYONE… cant test it right now. Again mysteriuos bugs with Wildfire Launcher in Windows version. Doesnt save deleting or creating of groups after restart.