Finally I searched and found an answer in Yahoo Answers on how to edit your yahoo server preferences. It didn’t work for me, though the others who tried it seemed to have had success.

Another week passed, and I was basically tearing out my hair, unable to be logged on to all the accounts I usually receive messages on. I went to the Pidgin site, where it said there was a new release with the problem fixed. I upgraded, but still could not connect.

Finally I found a blog on the site that explained the issue. Apparently, over the years, yahoo has changed the login encryption type several times, though various servers were still accepting the old encryption types. Finally they just eliminated the obsolete ones, leaving those of us who use a client like Pidgin that relied on the old server protocol SOL.

What I had to do was undo the fix that I made last week. If you are still having this problem, it means you haven’t upgraded to the latest pidgin. Just go do it and you should be back in business.

One of the project programmers said that they used to have this feature (the wrong status message always showing unless you manually edited it out), and some people loved it. Some people also hated it, so they took it away. Then they decided to bring it back, in response to the large number of people who were demanding that they show the wrong status message every time they changed status or popped out of the away status. We’re a bunch of ingrates for failing to appreciate what a wonderful feature it is. We should want to edit our message dozens of times a day. We have nothing else to do with our lives.

See, it’s not a bug, it’s a FEATURE! Yes, most people want to have the wrong status message showing at all times. They demand it.

Right. Not. Actually it’s a bunch of lazy programmers who want to inconvenience millions people to save them writing a few lines of code.

They have no intention of making it an option. And they didn’t even consider having it show the right status message when your status changes.

Pidgin is a good chat client, great for people (like me) who have multiple identities and want to be available in all of them at the same time. You can chat with all your buddies in the same tabbed chat window, even make it as wide as your screen width to keep more chat sessions open.

It’s got a great chat log, so I always have instant access to conversations I have had in the past. This is not an issue so much for me, but to remind other people of what they have said to me. o when somebody says something about what supposedly happened before, I can just copy and paste the history into our conversation.

It’s not a full-featured chat client, so some things you can’t do. They seem to have file transfer, and it seems to work okay much of the time. You can’t share photos, and lots of other people try to send you photos. They don’t even get an error message, and you don’t get notified about this.

And I have to log in to yahoo when I want to watch a cam.

But it’s got some really annoying bugs, related to how it edits its XML files.

I know you don’t want to know about this. I didn’t really want to know, I wanted Pidgin to work right for me. But ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I was reading up on XML files, and I realized that these problems I was havinge were probably related to XML files, which hold editable data.

The first problem I have is that when you block somebody, you can’t just unblock them later. They stay blocked. To help me with this, I searched online and found that the file that controls this is the buddy list, or Documents and Settings/User/Application Data/.purple/blist.xml. I won’t go into exactly what I edited. But if you want to do this, first save the file as a text file as backup. Then you can compare your buddies, find the one who is blocked, and change their blocked status to whatever the status of unblocked buddies is.

The next problem is one that’s been bugging me for ages, since an upgrade or two ago. When you set your availability to “available”, there is no default status message. If you are away for a while, your status changes to Away, and your status message changes to “I’m not here right now”. I can live with that. But when you reset your availability to “available”, your status message continues to be “I’m not here right now”, when obviously you are, or you wouldn’t have changed yourself to “available” at all.

One of my standard statuses seems to be “4″. I’m not sure how or when that happened, but I figured that ought to be something I should change, as it’s not at all useful.

I looked at all the XML files in that same folder, and the one that needs to be edited is of course status.xml. You can look at each state and see what the default message is. Here’s the problem:

<state>available</state>
<message>I&apos;m not here right now</message>

The default message for the available state is “I’m not here right now”. You have to change that not only here, but also you should probably go down to the individual accounts and change them, too, where it looks like this:

<substatus>
<account protocol=’prpl-yahoo’>youruserid</account>
<state>available</state>
<message>I&apos;m not here right now</message>
</substatus>

If you want to use an apostrophe, use the &apos; coding they have used here. If you want to use other characters, you will have to look them up and test them to make sure they don’t mess you up.

Some girls do sightspeed, which has the annoying feature of making it really easy for a customer to record your cam within the program, so many avoid it.

I also know a few who use Paltalk, but the viewer has to pay for an account to watch, so that doesn’t work for too many.

I use a company called influxis.com. It’s a flash media host, which means that it hosts and streams your feed on flash, which is about the most common format there is nowadays.

I had looked at buying software to put in a video chatroom, but all of them cost a bundle (like $1000 for a real video chatroom), and then after you paid, you still had to get a flash media server.

With this one, you get a bundle of free chatroom and broadcast scripts that come configured for your website. So you do need a site to put the embed code on.

I was chatting with a guy on yahoo who wanted to show me his cam, but it froze up every couple of minutes. I sent him to one of my chatrooms, and the picture was perfect, no more freezeups.

Plans start at $10 a month and the cost is determined by how much bandwidth you use and how many simultaneous connections you want.

I’d like to say I’m getting a signup fee for saying this, but they don’t have an affiliate program for customers. Check it out if you have your own site. If you’re busy, it will more than pay for itself.