I have Openfire set up with the monitoring service plugin which we have been using with Pidgin on the desktop. One of the things I’ve noticed is that when I sign in to another computer on the same account, I do not get a history of recent messages (which I thought the monitoring plugin was supposed to provide).
The other thing that doesn’t seem to be working right is when I am logged in to two computers simultaneously (using the same account). I expect to see chat messages showing up on BOTH devices so I can go between machines, which again is something I thought the monitoring plug was supposed to provide.
The settings I believe are related are under “Offline messages” which I have set to always store, and retain for up to 30 days. Should I bee looking for anything else?
I have been using Pidgin with XMPP on Google for years, so I know both the XMPP protocol and the Pidgin client are capable of handling this functionality. I’ve been digging around trying to find a solution, and see a lot of things claiming Pidgin is the culprit here, but those messages are a decade old. I can’t seem to find any information on the subject for Openfire newer than about 2016.
I’m hoping there’s a setting I need to change or another plugin I need to add to get both of these features working on my server? I really love the software otherwise but this seems like a really basic function that should just work, and I am hoping someone can point me to whatever I’m missing.
Sorry, but don’t use Pidgin for XMPP. It hasn’t been updated for a decade and just doesn’t support many features.
And yet it was doing exactly what I’m asking about with the Google chat until Google changed their server a few months ago and locked out 3rd-party clients. Pidgin also did this a decade ago when they still had an open XMPP server. I’m not asking for some fantastically new feature that just came out, I just want to recreate the same functionality I’ve always had with other servers.
Google chat was using a different libpurple backend that is not xmpp and I am relatively sure you misremember what Pidgin was able to do a decade ago with XMPP.
Hmm ok. So Google just had something in between that presented as XMPP to pidgin? Google’s original chat was open so it was easy to connect to. I know that presented as XMPP because I still have the old account on my system (yeah I’m really bad about deleting stuff that no longer works). Then a few years ago Google decided to put their chat behind Oauth2 authentication, which required a specialized pidgin plugin and a bit of manual setup to get it to work. Those are the two versions of Google chat I’ve worked with. Before that I was using Yahoo chat, but we all know what a joke Verizon made of that.
So during this time I would log in to the same account both from home and from work. I think you might be right though, that all new messages only appeared on the latest machine to log in. And that appears to still be the case using Openfire.
After Google updated their chat, when I got in to work the new setup sent a copy of all the messages I hadn’t already seen on that client since the last time I signed in, so there was always a full history. Again this setup used an XMPP account in Pidgin, but it’s certainly possible that the plugin which worked with the Oauth2 authentication provided some new features to pull the history down? The odd thing was that some of my chat during the day would show up on my computer at home, but not all of the messages, and I never really understood what the difference was.
Regardless, is there a newer XMPP client you might recommend which is somewhat similar to pidgin’s look&feel, but actually provides a history when connecting from multiple machines? It would certainly be nice if all messages from myself and the people I spoke to were shown on both machines while they are simultaneously signed in, but I can make do without that. However I really do need the history to show up when I sign in to the next machine, and I’m hoping at some point to also get a client set up on my phone (gotta join that 21st century at some point!).
Server side you need “message carbons” and “message archive management” (MAM) enabled to have that work. I never used OpenFire, but it is standard on other XMPP servers.
I think PSI uses a similar UI cincept, but it is also not updated anymore. I would recommend Gajim instead.
Thanks, that’s some good info to track down! I actually loaded up Gajim on my desktop last night and it does seem to be better suited to the task.