TL;DR — Privacy lists don't give us anything that we actually want to have that the blocking command doesn't give us already, and they're too complicated.
Hi all, I would like to restart the discussion on deprecating XEP-0016: Privacy Lists [1] in favor of XEP-0191: Blocking Command [2]. Currently, we list both XEPs on the website with shiny green "this is recommended" text (privacy lists are final, blocking command is draft) which is confusing. I would like to see us make a single concrete recommendation in the future, and I think that the blocking command is a better candidate to be that XEP. The last time I brought this up, the main argument against was that the blocking command didn't address all of the cases that privacy lists does. This is true, and I see it as a feature. Specifically, the following points were raised: 1. The blocking command does not allow blocking of anyone that you don't have a subscription too This is not true, however, the language was unclear. Since then this has been clarified. It was also mentioned that domains couldn't be blocked, but this was also untrue and works fine. 2. The blocking command does not allow blocking traffic from strangers except for presence subscription requests. This is mostly brought up in terms of spam prevention, however, it does not do a good job at preventing spam (presence subscription spam is also a thing). In general, I think this is generally something that's appropriate to very specific use cases, but is not something we (the XSF) should encourage in general: it damages the network, and makes XMPP less useable and more confusing for everyone. People that have this option turned on in a client won't understand why their friends can't contact them and they can't contact their friends after one of them sends a presence request (but a bidirectional relationship hasn't been established), also if you don't want to expose that this setting is on and your friend is trying to contact you, they won't have any indication that their messages are being dropped. Furthermore, although in theory the blocking command and privacy lists can use the same backend store, it is not entirely clear how this would work in a general way. Until recently if you blocked a conversation in Gajim (which uses privacy lists), it would not show up as blocked in Conversations (using the blocking command). This was fixed by tweaking Gajim's privacy list to use the format the server expected for a shared list, but the flexibility of privacy lists just means it would happen again in a different way on another server or with different clients. There is no general solution. Finally, Prosody 0.10 has removed their privacy lists implementation in favor of the blocking command already because the privacy lists protocol was too complicated and lead to buggy code, which indicates to me that this isn't a protocol we should recommend. I'd love your thoughts before I bring this before the council for a vote. Best, sam [1]: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0016.html [2]: https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0191.html _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list Info: https://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/standards Unsubscribe: [email protected] _______________________________________________
