Controversy over new Pidgin feature

Newer versions of Pidgin have the text input area resize to fit the text typed in, similar to Google Talk. This made a bunch of people all pissy, and now they want to fork Pidgin. The new project, funpidgin, intends to be just like Pidgin, only with a development team that cares about the users and lives to satisfy their needs.

That didn’t come out as sarcastic as I wanted, so I’ll just say it: the people behind funpidgin and everyone else complaining about the UI change in Pidgin are a bunch of whiners.

First of all, if users are so upset about Pidgin not acting just the way they like it, they can download a plugin that reverts the text box behavior to be just like it was before. In my mind, this pretty much invalidates most of their complaints. Not to mention, most of their complaints are along the lines of: “I don’t like it, change it back,” which is not helpful and is rightly being ignored. For all those with legitimate complaints (some people apparently like to edit large blocks of text inside Pidgin, which IMO seems stupid but at least they gave a valid reason for why they dislike the change), they can just install the plugin and the problem goes away.

It seems now that the bigger problem is about how “insensitive” the devs have been. Frankly, I sympathize with them. The users upset at the change want an option added in the preferences menu to toggle on and off the new functionality, but in terms of maintaining the software, UI options like that makes everything harder to debug, and add unneeded clutter to the interface. One of the devs explained it better than I could. That aside, it’s still the developer’s choice what happens in Pidgin. People seem to forget this. Just because the community wants something doesn’t mean it has to be added — the users aren’t the boss of the developers.

I predict the following will happen: most people won’t notice a thing, the offended users will get used to the change, the fork will dry up, and in a few months everyone will forget about this whole thing. Pidgin is an active project; it’s being updated and improved constantly, and that means some things are going to change. We can either bitch about it, or we can get used to it. Personally, I prefer the new interface, but even if I didn’t I’d still use Pidgin — it’s the best IM program out there, and a little UI tweak isn’t going to change that.

Posted by probabilityZero on April 30, 2008 | Filed under: Opinion, Tech and games