Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.5)
Installed from:    FreeBSD Ports

When contacts are arranged by groups, the contacts inside each group are sorted as follows:
* Online
* Away
* Offline
* Unknown

To me, "online" and "away" are really the same thing; both types of users are online, both can be messaged. The only difference is that "online" users are slightly more likely to be at the keyboard than those marked "away". There certainly is no guarantee that all contacts have set their statuses correctly. I would therefore like to have the option of ignoring the "away" setting then sorting contacts. That is, I would like to have my contacts sorted in the following order:
* Online or away (the union of those two sets)
* Offline
* Unknown

I seem to remember having used this way of sorting at some point in the past. It might have been the official ICQ client or maybe SIM which offered this and I keep thinking that it would be a valuable addition to Kopete. Here are two typical use cases for me where the distinction between "online" and "away" annoys me and wastes my time:

1. When I want to message somebody, I have to find them in the contact list. I have *a lot* of users in the first group and do not like using the quick search box. Thus, I have to look through the list. First, I need to check among the "online" users, then among those "away" and finally, those marked as "offline". I could save a lot of time by having to look through only two alphabetically sorted lists ("online or away" and "offline") instead of three ("online", "away" and "offline").

2. A much more common use case for me is this: I am a big fan of the one-shot e-mail message window. When someone messages me, I hit "reply", write my reply, click "send" and after this, the message window disappears. Often, at this point I remember that I forgot to mention something. Thus, I need to find the person I just talked to in my contact list so I can send them a follow-up message. Since I just got a message from that person, it is very likely that they are either "online" or "away", but I do not know which of the two - and I do not care. I have to look through the "online" users first and then through those marked "away" when I could simply look through a single list of all available contacts if the two were merged.

Well, I hope this exhaustive explanation is sufficient to make clear what I mean. If anybody wants to try this mode of sorting to get a better feel for it, here is a one-line patch that enables it in Kopete 0.12.x:

--- kdenetwork/kopete/kopete/contactlist/kopetemetacontactlvi.cpp.orig  Sat Jan 20 00:41:55 2007
+++ kdenetwork/kopete/kopete/contactlist/kopetemetacontactlvi.cpp       Sat Jan 20 00:41:57 2007
@@ -936,7 +936,7 @@
                importanceChar = 'A';
                break;
        case Kopete::OnlineStatus::Away:
-               importanceChar = 'B';
+               importanceChar = 'A';
                break;
        case Kopete::OnlineStatus::Offline:
                importanceChar = 'C';