Server-enforced active/idle/away status?

Openfire Openfire Support
1

So my pet peeve is people who use IM clients but don’‘t configure them to allow others to see whether they’‘re idle. Pisses me off something terrible. With personal contacts on the commodity services (AIM, Y!, etc.) I can understand the motivation, but I don’'t think I should have to deal with this on the company internal XMPP server that I administer.

I haven’‘t succeeded in getting all of the employees to make these changes on their clients, so I’‘m wondering if there’‘s any clever way to enforce this on the server side. Would the protocol allow for a plugin that automatically changed a user’‘s status under certain conditions? It clearly couldn’‘t be based on the same criteria as the clients use, since there’'s no way for the server to know if the mouse is moving or keys are being typed in some other application. But how about if the server sees nothing but keepalives from a particular user session for a certain period of time?

Of course, the main drawback of this is that the only way for a force-idled user to un-idle himself would be to send a message, or search, or initiate some other direct interaction with the server.

Just noodling here… anybody have thoughts?

2

Anything done on the server side would be clumsy in my opinion, as you noted. I think the best solution to this problem is to find a client that you can lock down.

3

yeeeah, people at our company are afraid that boss will se if they are idle for a long time:D I understand you very well, dont have much power on this nasty users either:) But i must agree with hrothgar. Only client side lock down would help. But i suppose you cant enforce them to use only one client?:slight_smile:

4

I don’‘t have much control over the clients. We’'re distributed geographically and working from home.

Well, phooey. I guess my only option is to exploit their desktops with a piece of malware that tweaks the client configuration files… Shame it had to come to this…