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How to catch invisible friends on GTalk

ajatus.in

1–10 of 32 posts

Re: How to catch invisible friends on GTalk

#4
A quick-and-dirty way to check if any given person is invisible is to just click on their name and send a message.

If they appear offline, but you don't see a response message that says " is offline and can't receive messages right now.", then they're invisible.

(Only checked this in the desktop Google Talk client and the Gmail chat version)

Re: How to catch invisible friends on GTalk

#6
Python to English translation: you'll still get presence information about the invisible person when you log in, just the presence status will be 'unavailable' (aka. offline).

This will have false-positives for people that genuinely have logged off (which gives the same stanza).

Another way to potentially check whether someone's online or not is to send a caps discovery request (ie. ask their client what XMPP extensions it support). If it replies, they're obviously online (haven't tested this, some clients may in fact be shrewd enough to ignore such requests when set to invisible).

Re: How to catch invisible friends on GTalk

#7
post #6

Python to English translation: you'll still get presence information about the invisible person when you log in, just the presence status will be 'unavailable' (aka. offline). This will have false-positives for people that genuinely have logged off (which gives the same stanza). Another way to potentially check whether someone's online or not is to send a caps discovery request (ie. ask their client what XMPP extensi…

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not getting any presence information from invisible users (was signed in as invisible from Gmail from another account) when I log in.

Re: How to catch invisible friends on GTalk

#9
post #3

As an exploit demonstration, this is at least noteworthy, maybe even interesting. Actually using it is a bit rude though; people set themselves invisible because they want privacy.

You could say the invisible people are rude. I've had people who always set themselves to be invisible, but will still talk to you and ask you for stuff. But since they are invisible you can't initiate.

Re: How to catch invisible friends on GTalk

#10
post #4

A quick-and-dirty way to check if any given person is invisible is to just click on their name and send a message. If they appear offline, but you don't see a response message that says " is offline and can't receive messages right now. ", then they're invisible. (Only checked this in the desktop Google Talk client and the Gmail chat version)

You still need to show offline contacts, and if that list is big it can be annoying.
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