Buddy List Synchronization issue

savage pink · Post by **savage pink** » Tue Dec 28, 2004 12:30 pm

Hey Folks.

I have moved my contacts list around, added a new category etc to keep everyone filed neatly in little boxes. However every time a log onto MSN I get error dialog boxes for every contact :

Buddy list synchronization issue in <myemailaddress> (MSN)

<buddyemailaddress> on the local list is inside the group "Individuals" but not on the server list. Do you want this buddy to be added?

When I answer "yes" it moves some of them back to "Buddies" keeps others in their new boxes... etc. This seems to happen 4/5 times I log onto MSN with Adium... but not every time?

Very queer indeed. Any help appreciated.

Thanks
SP

jb · Post by jb » Sat Jan 01, 2005 7:45 pm

Had the same problem here (wrote a post about it).

Moving contacts around in MSN seems to be a bit buggy. What I found was that even if the buddy had been successfully moved to its new group, Adium still thought it should be in its old group. In this instance, pressing "No" solves the problem. However if the move wasn't successful then pressing "No" deletes the contact from your buddy list entirely (pressing "Yes" causes the same error every time Adium loads...).

My solution wasthis: for the few buddies where this was a problem I deleted and readded them to the group that I wanted them in and now no longer move buddies unless necessary.

You can also use the standard MSN client to ensure that all your buddies are in the correct place.

Hopefully this bug will be fixed at some point? It's paricularly annoying for me as I only use Adium for MSN.

JB

Spade Aceman · Post by **Spade Aceman** » Tue Jan 04, 2005 6:47 pm

My solution wasthis: for the few buddies where this was a problem I deleted and readded them to the group that I wanted them in and now no longer move buddies unless necessary.

Even this doesn't work -- I removed and re-added the contacts to the group I wanted, but the next time I logged in Adium added a new group with the same name, only in all-caps, to the contact list for these contacts. In other words, I went through all the steps listed above to add these contacts to my "Friends" list, but the next time I logged in I ended up with a brand new "FRIENDS" list with just those MSN contacts in it. Very annoying. Hopefully this can be fixed.

Update: This may be an MSN-specific issue, trying to create a "Friends" group from within Hotmail always gives me an uppercase "FREINDS" group instead.

Spade Aceman · Post by **Spade Aceman** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 1:04 am

Follow-up post -- the MSN group issues appear to be corrected in 0.74, thanks to the folks who fixed this! :)

Post by **evands** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 2:21 am

Good

Spade Aceman · Post by **Spade Aceman** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 3:01 pm

Argh... I spoke too soon, the same frustrating capitalization issues are still occurring with my MSN account. My "Friends" and "Family" groups insist on being created in all-caps on MSN, and if I try to move my MSN contacts to the regular-case groups and delete the empty all-caps ones, I get an error about the group not being able to be deleted for some odd reason, and the next time I log in I get synchronization errors asking me to re-add my contacts from those groups.

The weird thing is that at first it seemed to behave, everything seemed to be fine after I moved contacts around, it looked like the capitalization issue was fixed. But then I signed in again and got those annoying all-caps group names from MSN again.

Could you please just change Adium so that it isn't case-sensitive about MSN group names? Clearly MSN itself isn't going to bother cooperating anytime soon. Even signing into Hotmail and manually deleting and re-creating the group with the capitalization I wanted still gave me the group name in all-caps. I'm just really tired of dealing with this issue over and over again.

Post by **bgannin** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 7:20 pm

That could lead to a fair amount of confusion if users group contacts from multiple services in the same group - all of a sudden the group is all caps and shows that way in AIM as it does in MSN and Adium... and it's an odd restriction. (doing a conversion where needed in a special MSN case so that any group-related action gets parsed into caps would seem to suffice though)

Post by **evands** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 7:30 pm

Spade Aceman wrote:Could you please just change Adium so that it isn't case-sensitive about MSN group names? Clearly MSN itself isn't going to bother cooperating anytime soon. Even signing into Hotmail and manually deleting and re-creating the group with the capitalization I wanted still gave me the group name in all-caps. I'm just really tired of dealing with this issue over and over again.

You said that the official client is doing this as well. I have never seen this happen on my MSN accounts.. but the official client doesn't do it to me, either. If the official client is doing it, there is probably nothing we can do about it.

Spade Aceman · Post by **Spade Aceman** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 8:19 pm

You said that the official client is doing this as well. I have never seen this happen on my MSN accounts.. but the official client doesn't do it to me, either. If the official client is doing it, there is probably nothing we can do about it.

Not the official client, as I don't have MSN Messenger installed, but when I go into Hotmail and remove and re-create the group with the capitalization I want, it stubbornly re-creates it with all caps. So it may be a problem specific just to the groups created in my particular MSN account, I dunno.

That could lead to a fair amount of confusion if users group contacts from multiple services in the same group - all of a sudden the group is all caps and shows that way in AIM as it does in MSN and Adium... and it's an odd restriction. (doing a conversion where needed in a special MSN case so that any group-related action gets parsed into caps would seem to suffice though)

Perhaps an option in "advanced" to ignore the case of group names between chat protocols? That way "Friends" in say AIM and "FRIENDS" in MSN would both map to the Adium group "Friends" (or however I've cased the group name in Adium).

Post by **evands** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 9:11 pm

Spade Aceman wrote:Not the official client, as I don't have MSN Messenger installed, but when I go into Hotmail and remove and re-create the group with the capitalization I want, it stubbornly re-creates it with all caps. So it may be a problem specific just to the groups created in my particular MSN account, I dunno.

Could be worth trying with MSN Messenger. Anyway, it sounds like a serverside problem in some form.

Perhaps an option in "advanced" to ignore the case of group names between chat protocols? That way "Friends" in say AIM and "FRIENDS" in MSN would both map to the Adium group "Friends" (or however I've cased the group name in Adium).

You mean both would show up as 'friends'. Or something. Sorry, but this is not going to be be a preference. This is the only report we've heard of this issue, and I am not convinced it's not a problem with MSN's servers or your account. If it is a demonstrable Adium bug, we will fix the bug, not add a preference to work around it.