Bug 119442

Summary:	invalid characters allowed when renaming groups
Product:	[Unmaintained] kopete	Reporter:	Mats Ahlgren <ahlgren>
Component:	ICQ and AIM Plugins	Assignee:	Kopete Developers <kopete-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Severity:	major
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Ubuntu
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Mats Ahlgren 2006-01-03 09:23:54 UTC

Version: (using KDE KDE 3.4.3)
Installed from: Ubuntu Packages

Problem:
When you rename groups (perhaps using hyphens, I'm not sure), and then restart Kopete, you will have duplicates of the groups you renamed except with the old name. Kopete will mistakenly say that the renamed copy of the group has, say, **/42 contacts, while the duplicate copy is empty with 0/0 contacts. This leads you to delete the new group which just appeared and has 0/0 contacts -- unfortunately this is the real server-side folder and actually contains all your contacts. Kopete just tricked you into deleting all your contacts.

This manifests as showing all my contacts as offline 100% of the time (except the default AIM bots: movie phone and shopping).

Severity:
Extremely severe - loses all AIM server-side data.

Recoverability:
It's slightly recoverable though; I'm still in the process of trying to do so. =p It seems another bug with Kopete prevents you from recovering easily, namely http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119441 (can't import multiple Kontact contacts at once) which I just reported, and also http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119440 (export to address book does not set AIM screenname to be default SN if no other SNs exist). If both these other bugs were fixed, you could feasibly recover within a few minutes. However, the very fact that Kopete keeps your buddy list info (which is helping me recover) is ALSO a bug (4 bugs interacting...): Kopete in some cases is ignoring the AOL server-side buddy lists; this could cause very undersirable behavior, such as in my current case, all users being offline permanently http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119437

Fix:
1) Make Kopete alot more careful when renaming to ensure that it uses the character set that AOL lets you use for groups. 2) Make Kopete alot more careful when renaming groups in general; looking over the code that does that might be a really good idea. 3) Make Kopete alot more careful when deleting groups it thinks are empty but really aren't because it couldn't detect it properly.

This is very, very similar to: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112109
(except that's on a different protocol, ICQ. Also that bug is closed-and-unresolved, and I've gone through a bit of trouble to elaborate on the situation here.)

Comment 1 Matt Rogers 2006-02-26 17:39:48 UTC

i need to know which characters you used to actually cause things to be invalid. Using hyphens didn't allow me to reproduce the bug.

Comment 2 Mats Ahlgren 2006-02-26 22:55:55 UTC

I maybe have used hyphens, spaces, ', and numbers at the end.
E.g. Friends - FHS '04

In the latest version of Kopete, the safeguards I mentioned have been put in, so if the entire buddy list is deleted then Kopete can recover it during the next restart. Nevertheless I've still had my entire buddy list become wiped from the AIM server once or twice.

Comment 3 Matt Rogers 2006-02-27 05:33:11 UTC

confirmed the problem with the rename. now to work on a fix.

Comment 4 Roman Jarosz 2006-07-25 18:42:06 UTC

I don't think that there are any restricted characters in AIM/ICQ.
I test it with 0.12.1 SVN and I can use all characters that are on my keyboard `~'";][... etc.

There are only two restriction that have to be fixed group name can't be empty and contact list can't have two groups with the same name.

The real problem is that if rename fails for some reason kopete will still rename that group and than we will have group with contacts that is empty in Kopete.

Also synchronization with server side list on login should check groups too and not only contacts. So user is warned if he have contact in diffrent group in Kopete than on server.

Comment 5 Roman K. 2008-07-07 00:48:48 UTC

I tested it with KDE 4.0.85 (KDE 4.1 >= 20080703) openSUSE packages and an ICQ account.

I can give the groups the name i want to, with every character i want to, for example "zzz~+*[]{³" and there are no problems. 

If I give two groups the same name, and restart kopete, the group that had that name first keeps as it is. But the contacts in the other group are in the contactlist under the group with the name before I renamed it. In addition to this an empty group with the same name as the first is also there. when i delete this empty group, it seems that also the contacts in this group are deleted from the server, because kopete asks me to add them after i restart again.

Example:
Groups:
xxx,zzz

I rename group xxx to zzz
I restart kopete

the contacts of xxx are in the group xxx, the contacts of zzz are in the group zzz, and another group zzz is there, but this one is empty. I delete the empty one and after I restart I have to add the contacts which were in xxx

Comment 6 Justin Zobel 2021-03-09 22:41:12 UTC

Thank you for the bug report.

As this report hasn't seen any changes in 5 years or more, we ask if you can please confirm that the issue still persists.

If this bug is no longer persisting or relevant please change the status to resolved.

Comment 7 Christoph Cullmann 2024-09-18 18:28:06 UTC

Dear user, unfortunately Kopete is no longer maintained.

Please migrate to another solution, e.g. for Jabber a possibility is Kaidan, for Matrix a candidate is NeoChat.