Annoyed of spam messages in public channels? Gajim just gained support for Message Moderation! Also this month: better message corrections and improved notifications.

Changes in Gajim

If you’re participating in public channels you might have witnessed spam from time to time. Someone comes along and pastes some URL about a promising business opportunity, or leaves an offending picture. Moderators can kick/ban spammers, but that does not remove those messages. With XEP-0425 Message Moderation, there is a standard for retracting messages from a group chat. Both server and client have to support this standard, and you have to be Moderator/Admin/Owner in order to be able to retract messages. Gajim 1.4 will support message moderation in both ways: by offering moderation actions for messages, and by displaying a disclaimer for message which have been moderated.

Coming with Gajim 1.4, message corrections done via XEP-0308 Last Message Correction will be stored in the database. Up until now, each correction has been stored as a separate message. From now on, the original message text will be stored, and each subsequent correction will replace the message’s text. This way, Gajim can restore message corrections when loading messages from the database while showing the original message in a tooltip. While working on this, we also updated Gajim to the latest version of the Last Message Correction standard, which allows to edit the same message multiple times.

Many of you asked about how to clean up the list of chats in Gajim’s Start Chat window. We went ahead an added a “Forget Group Chat” menu item for each group chat. This effectively obsoletes the bookmarks management window, which is now read-only.

What else happened:

• Windows installer is ready for Gajim 1.4
• Notifications now show details of received files instead of a plain https:// or aesgcm:// link
• Avatars: non-square images are now displayed correctly by zooming in before cutting out a circle

Plugin updates

Almost all plugins are now ready for Gajim 1.4.

Changes in python-nbxmpp

XEP-0425 Message Moderation is now supported by python-nbxmpp.

There is a huge change for python-nbxmpp coming, which involves a new XML parser and a lot of type checking. Read more about that in upcoming posts.

As always, feel free to join gajim@conference.gajim.org to discuss with us.