Changes to contact list not sticking

jld · Post by **jld** » Mon Apr 02, 2007 10:52 pm

I'm using adium 1.0.1 or 1.0.2 on three computers. Two at home, and one at work. The other day I went through and cleaned up contacts and groups on my home computer. I got everything looking like how I wanted it and then went to work the next day. When I logged in, all the changes I had made had been reverted and I was back where I started. Went back home and found that the changes had reverted at home again. Looks like the cached contact list overwrote any changes I had made.

Any advice on how to avoid this?

Thanks!

John

Post by **evands** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 12:01 am

What service(s)?

drmoque · Post by **drmoque** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 12:20 am

This will not resolve your problem but may give you a solution for the future. I have a similar situation in that I have two at home and one at work. My solution to keeping things synced was to get Portable Adium and put it on my flash drive. Now I only have one set of lists/prefs/styles/etc. to worry about. Also I have a single set of chat logs, which I personally find very convenient.

If you have the luxury of using a flash drive or other portable drive, Portable Adium may offer a better long term solution. You can get Portable Adium from
http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/adium/

Post by **The_Tick** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 12:27 am

drmoque wrote:This will not resolve your problem but may give you a solution for the future. I have a similar situation in that I have two at home and one at work. My solution to keeping things synced was to get Portable Adium and put it on my flash drive. Now I only have one set of lists/prefs/styles/etc. to worry about. Also I have a single set of chat logs, which I personally find very convenient.

If you have the luxury of using a flash drive or other portable drive, Portable Adium may offer a better long term solution. You can get Portable Adium from
http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/adium/

This doesn't help to get to the main cause of the issue. I know you're trying to help, and are excited about portable adium, but in the meantime this doesn't help us to resolve the actual issue for everyone.

drmoque · Post by **drmoque** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 1:10 am

The_Tick wrote:
This doesn't help to get to the main cause of the issue. I know you're trying to help, and are excited about portable adium, but in the meantime this doesn't help us to resolve the actual issue for everyone.

You are quite right which is why I started with the statement that said

drmoque wrote: This will not resolve your problem but may give you a solution for the future.

It was provided as additional information for the original poster as a courtesy as well to others who view these posts. Also you may note, the original post came from someone who registered just today and may not have even realized there was an alternative way to use on Adium on multiple machines.

It is also true that I am anticipating that part of the problem may be the whole issue of synchronizing settings across multiple computers. Thus I offered an alternative that deals with what I anticipated was the "larger issue".

Finally, I would point out that the poster asked:

jld wrote: Any advice on how to avoid this?

My suggestion does indeed avoid the problem since there would be only one copy of Adium with settings to deal with though it may not fix the specific problem encountered.

If, however, I breeched posting etiquette, I will be happy to remove my original post until the cause of the problem has been identified.

jld · Post by **jld** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 4:32 am

I didn't know about portable adium, which I'll look into, but I'm not worried enough about this to carry my adium install around with me everywhere on a flash drive.

I'm using AIM, MSN, and GoogleTalk.

Post by **evands** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 4:50 am

You definitely did not breach posting etiquette by offering helpful advice to let a fellow user work around a problem.

The only thing that you might have done differently is to encourage the original poster to still answer the question so we can resolve the heart of the issue... but honestly, that's for bonus points, IMO.

drmoque · Post by **drmoque** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 4:58 am

evands wrote: The only thing that you might have done differently is to encourage the original poster to still answer the question so we can resolve the heart of the issue... but honestly, that's for bonus points, IMO.

Good point. I will endeavor to remember that for the future. Hopefully you all can find the heart of the problem since Portable Adium is not a viable solution in this case.

Post by **The_Tick** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 7:39 am

drmoque wrote:
evands wrote: The only thing that you might have done differently is to encourage the original poster to still answer the question so we can resolve the heart of the issue... but honestly, that's for bonus points, IMO.
Good point. I will endeavor to remember that for the future. Hopefully you all can find the heart of the problem since Portable Adium is not a viable solution in this case.

Right, what Evan said is what I meant to say. I am generally a lot more crass without knowing it on the forums, and don't mean it in any way.

Post by **bgannin** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 7:42 am

The_Tick wrote:I am generally a lot more crass without knowing it on the forums, and don't mean it in any way.

With much love, this should totally be a sticky!

roflmao

drmoque · Post by **drmoque** » Tue Apr 03, 2007 6:20 pm

The_Tick wrote:Right, what Evan said is what I meant to say. I am generally a lot more crass without knowing it on the forums, and don't mean it in any way.

No worries. I know you all work very hard at your day jobs, developing Adium and offering support via these forums. I was just trying to do my part to give back to the community.

In that vein, I would like to pose a question to the dev team that hopefully gets back to John's original post.

How is Adium supposed to handle the following scenario:

User makes changes to contact list on computer A that presumably synchronizes with the service provider servers. Now user goes to computer B with a different contact list saved on the local machine than on the service provide servers. At this point, does Adium attempt to synchronize the two sets of contact lists and if so how?

John, while I have never encountered this problem on Adium, back when I was a windows user I did have this same exact problem with a program called Trillian which is also a multiprotocal IM. I basically had to repeat my contact list changes on each machine or it would add the deleted contacts back because of the synchronization scheme. The solution I discovered was to make my changes on a given machine, then copy the contact list file on to a disk and manually replace it on my other installations prior to opening them after my changes. For Trillian, this was simple because the contact list was an XML file.

If this trick is a possible solution with Adium, then perhaps someone who knows the inner workings better than I can identify the file or files that could be copied to transfer the revised contact list to the other computers.

Again, I hope this helps get the ball rolling again.