> If I give too much relevance to the user nickname or other information in > control of the contact, then I think we are opening up a lot of avenues of > attack. Just showing the avatar is problem enough.
I agree, automatic naming of contacts is quite dangerous. Still, users ask us for that feature quite regularly. I wonder what we could do for them. Maybe some semi-automatic way of updating the nickname where the user has to explicitly request a nickname update could work, although I'm not sure if it's worth the extra menu item (if you can see the nickname in 'more info', you could ). But anyway, that's a separate issue. If we agree that it's bad practice to hide the real roster name from the user, I guess meta-contacts based on roster name is an easy enough solution. cheers, Remko
