Control channel with show_users "online,away,offline" still generate joins/quits about bitlbee-discord

[sm00th]

Tried this, and I can't reproduce it with BitlBee-3.4.1+20151227+master+124-gba7618d-git and latest bitlbee-discord. Are there any other settings that can affect this that you are using? Can you try this with latest bitlbee?

[digitalcircuit]

I'm still encountering it with the Bitlbee nightly Debian repository on Ubuntu 16.04 and the most recent bitlbee-discord (c71bc10). Notably, I'm not using the primary control channel, but a secondary one specific to Discord.

Relevant settings

Main control channel - &bitlbee

<BitlbeeNick> channel set
<root> account is empty
<root> auto_join = `true'
<root> fill_by = `!protocol'
<root> group is empty
<root> protocol = `discord'
<root> show_users = `online+,special%,away'
<root> type = `control'
<BitlbeeNick> account discord set
<root> auto_connect = `true'
<root> auto_reconnect = `true'
<root> away is empty
<root> edit_prefix = `EDIT: '
<root> host = `discordapp.com'
<root> incoming_me_translation = `on'
<root> max_backlog = `50'
<root> mention_ignorecase = `off'
<root> mention_suffix = `[:,]'
<root> nick_format is empty
<root> nick_source = `handle'
<root> password = `********' (hidden)
<root> send_acks = `on'
<root> status = `Bitlbee IRC bridge'
<root> tag = `discord'
<root> urlinfo_handle = `urlinfo'
<root> username = `[EMAIL]@gmail.com'
<root> voice_status_notify = `off'

Discord control channel - &discord

<BitlbeeNick> channel set
<root> account is empty
<root> auto_join = `false'
<root> fill_by = `protocol'
<root> group is empty
<root> protocol = `discord'
<root> show_users = `online,away,offline'
<root> type = `control'

[sm00th]

Copied those settings one to one and I still can't reproduce this issue.

[digitalcircuit]

That's odd. Perhaps something else is amiss in my configuration, though the only other thing that comes to mind is having an away-notify-capable IRC client (Quassel 0.13-git-e6788734).

Sometime between now and university mayhem winding down (finals, etc), I'll try a fresh Ubuntu 16.04 container/VM and configure Bitlbee + bitlbee-discord from scratch to see if I can still reproduce the issue.

[digitalcircuit]

After some discussion with @dequis on the topic, one idea was bitlbee-discord implementing a offline_users_as_away setting (needs a better name) so offline users only show up as another away state, rather than entirely offline. This would get rid of the join/quit spam for Discord while still allowing quits for other accounts where they're significant, e.g. XMPP with long-lived sessions.

So it doesn't get lost to the ether of Internet, here's a trimmed snippet of relevant discussion:

Context: offline_users_quit being set to true by default in Bitlbee.

[dx] digitalcircuit: yep that's exactly it
[digitalcircuit] dx: Ah, nice! Per-account would be useful (e.g. Discord generates tens to hundreds of quits a day, XMPP is.. 1 or 2), but that's not required. [...]
[dx] show_users isn't per-account either
[dx] the main problem is that quits are a global thing, and what's changed by show_users is per-channel
[dx] i mean, when an irc user quits, it quits everywhere
[digitalcircuit] However, offline_users_quit could be per-account. It affects all nicks -from that account-, specifying whether they quit-then-join-relevant-channels where show_offline is true, or only leave (no quit) in channels where show_offline is false.
[dx] why would you want to have offline_users_quit enabled for a subset of your accounts, in that case?
[digitalcircuit] For accounts where it's meaningful if a user goes offline.
[digitalcircuit] Discord keeps track of offline messages and delivers them almost identically, and offline seems to happen much more often. XMPP delivers offline, too, but I have OTR enabled (may cause issues) and with the contacts I have on XMPP, it's generally more meaningful when they quit - they closed the client, not just a brief interruption of service.
[digitalcircuit] This is potentially a specialized use-case, and I'd understand not wanting the maintenance burden, whatever that may be.
[dx] i don't think the solution to this problem should go through offline_users_quit
[dx] it might make more sense to have things like discord or facebook not announcing offline states, just making that another 'away'
[dx] or a per-account setting to turn offline into away
[digitalcircuit] Offline vs away has some minor significance, so.. per-account setting for those types of chat systems might work best. [...]

[sm00th]

Added an option for this, can you try it out in your setup?

[digitalcircuit]

I've updated the bitlbee-discord plugin on my server and enabled the never_offline option. Later this evening after verifying it works, I'll go ahead and close this bug report.

Thanks for your time and effort spent on this fix!