{"id":428,"date":"2007-04-20T11:52:24","date_gmt":"2007-04-20T02:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-04-20\/428"},"modified":"2007-04-20T19:07:02","modified_gmt":"2007-04-20T10:07:02","slug":"unavoiable-decisions-with-yahoo-messenger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-04-20\/428","title":{"rendered":"Unavoidable Decisions with Yahoo! Messenger"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n

One of the tenets in designing large multiuser systems like Yahoo!\nMessenger is that one user should not be able to overly disrupt another, or\nforce another to take some action. Yahoo! Messenger generally does a good<\/span>\njob with this, but has long had one failing that really bothers me.<\/p>\n\n

For whatever reason, I seem to<\/span> be a popular<\/span> target for random people\nwanting to add me to their “friends list.” I wake<\/span> up in the morning to find\na Yahoo!<\/span> Messenger dialog on my screen that looks like this:<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>\n\n

99% of the time, I have no<\/span> idea who the person is, and checking their\nprofile has always lead to no extra information. Is this a<\/span> long-lost friend\ngetting in touch? A kook pestering<\/span> hundreds of people a day<\/span>? A crook<\/span> trying\nto lure me to a phishing<\/a> site? A spammer<\/span> checking for “live” IDs? I generally<\/span> have no idea, but considering that the\nnumber of evil people in the world exceeds the number of my long lost\nfriends, chances are it's someone up to no good.<\/p>\n\n

What I want to do is to just ignore the request, a technical<\/span> equivalent\nof a “no comment.” If it's indeed someone who wants to contact me\nspecifically (rather than someone trolling for victims), they'll try again,\nor send me a note<\/span> introducing themselves.<\/p>\n\n

However, Yahoo! Messenger has been designed such that a random<\/span> person\ncan force<\/i> me into making a decision.<\/span> There's no “ignore”\nor “close” or “cancel” button on that dialog.<\/p>\n\n

I don't want to explicitly allow them because of the high probability\nit's someone being a pest,<\/span> at best, or at worst, evil. I know that<\/span> the\ndefault is that they can view me (and as such, doing nothing is the\ntechnical equivalent of allowing them), but it just feels wrong that I have<\/span>\nno choice but to explicitly allow them.<\/p>\n\n

Of course, I could<\/span> go ahead and explicitly bar them from seeing me and\nfrom contacting me, but I don't<\/span> want to do that due to the possibility that\nthey are<\/b> a long<\/span>-lost friend, or, at least, someone clueful wishing a\nreal<\/span> discourse.<\/p>\n\n

I don't know why Yahoo! has chosen to do it this way, but I wish<\/span> they'd\nfix it. This aside, I really<\/span> enjoy Yahoo! Messenger. It's an\nexceptional<\/i> value for what I pay<\/span> (nothing), so I have<\/span> no real right\nto complain, but it's technically so wrong that the engineer in me has to\nspeak up.<\/p>\n\n

By the way, the bit of desktop background seen behind the dilaog above\nis my Colors of Kyoto<\/a> background.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the tenets in designing large multiuser systems like Yahoo! Messenger is that one user should not be able to overly disrupt another, or force another to take some action. Yahoo! Messenger generally does a good job with this, but has long had one failing that really bothers me.<\/p>

For whatever reason, I seem to be a popular target for random people wanting to add me to their \"friends list.\" I wake up in the morning to find a Yahoo! Messenger dialog on my screen that looks like this:<\/p>

99% of the time, I have no idea who the [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}