Re: multiple profiles for one account

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004, Meredydd wrote:

> For starters, I think it would be great if someone not already 
> intimately familiar with the Yahoo protocol would care to explain to 
> the rest of us exactly what a "profile" *is*... It's mentioned a couple 
> of times in the libyahoo2 headers, but I have no real clue what it is. 
> The comment "if you don't know what this is about, you don't want to 
> use this function" is informative, and directed me correctly when I 
> wrote the initial iteration of that code, but it's not all that helpful 
> for understanding... <g>

Well, the way Yahoo does profiles is fairly simple, really. Every Yahoo
account has a list of identities associated with it. These are aliases for the
account, and each is associated with a different profile. For our purposes
identity and profile can be considered to be synonyms. When a Yahoo account
logs in, yahoo sends us a list of all of the identities that are associated
with that account. The yahoo protocol allows us to control which of those are
currently active, although the primary identity (the account itself) is always
active, as far as I can tell. The yahoo clients always seem to make all
identities active when you log in, and don't seem to have an interface to
change that, but that is not built in to the protocol. One of the interesting
quirks of the yahoo protocol is that if you log in using the account name,
only that name shows up as online by default, but if you use one of the other
identities, that identity and the primary account identity show up as online.
For identities to work properly, it is very important that your other
indentities don't leak to the buddy you are communicating with, or else there
is no point to them. For example, if your primary identity is
mafia_accountant001 and somebody sends a message to your alternate identity
fbi_informant042, and your response appears to come FROM mafia_accountant001,
this would be a bad thing. Of course, if it happens the other way, it would
probably be an instantly fatal thing :-) It is also necessary to be able
to choose which identity to send a message from when initiating a message to a
buddy. Ideally, we would want to remember which identity to use by default
when communicating with a particular buddy, to help prevent errors...
The Yahoo client doesn't support remembering which identity to use with which
buddy, but at least it preserves identity during a conversation, and has a
drop-down list to choose which one to use when sending a message to a buddy
initially, so it is usable, at least.

-- 
Craig West         Ph: (416) 666-1645	|  It's not a bug,
[email protected]              	|  It's a feature...