Kopete/Jabber Muc

Internet-group-chat Jabber Group Chat, also called MUC (multi user chat) is the Jabber equivalent of IRC channels.

The Kopete support of MUC is only partial, this is because our backend XMPP library (iris) only supports the old GroupChat protocol. Anyway, Kopete is still pretty good and some good improvements have been made in the version 0.12

This page will describe some hidden Kopete features.

MUC is really a good alternative to IRC. It supports almost everything that IRC supports and even more.

Join a groupchat

First things first, Kopete users sometimes ask how the join a groupchat. This is the join groupchat action in the jabber menu. There, a dialog asks you for the room and the server and your nick. Imagine you want to join [email protected]. "kde" is the room and "conference.kdetalk.net" is the server.

Style

Using the default style for groupchats is a bit annoying due to the space waste. Fortunately, some styles render groupchats well.

For Kopete 0.12 i would recommend theses style: The Gaim style with the Contact Color variant. The Kone style with the Contact Color No Icon Compact variant (available on kde-look)

Invitation

Did you know that from Kopete v.0.12, it is possible to invite a contact to a MUC ? Simply drag and drop the contact in the MUC chat window.

Bookmarks

Kopete uses JEP-0048 for showing the chat bookmark menu. There is no Kopete interface to remove or edit bookmarks. Each chat you join is automatically added to your bookmarks.

You could anyway use the send RAW XML dialog (in the jabber account menu) to edit the bookmark in XML on the server, as explained in JEP-0048 and JEP-0049

Example, to erase your bookmarks, enter

  <query xmlns='jabber:iq:private'>
    <storage xmlns='storage:bookmarks'>
  </query>

Then disconnect and reconnect in order the changes take effect.

Auto-JOIN

Kopete does also support auto-joining groupchat when connecting. This still follow the bookmark specification of JEP-0048.

Example, if you want to automatically join [email protected] when starting Kopete, you can sendthe following

  <query xmlns='jabber:iq:private'>
    <storage xmlns='storage:bookmarks'>
      <conference name='Kde channel'>
                  autojoin='true'
                  jid='[email protected]'>
        <nick>Puck</nick>
      </conference>
    </storage>
  </query>

XML

More generally, most of moderation and admin feature are available with the XML console, although you need to have compiled kde with debug in order to see the result in the debug output. Run kdebugdialog andmake sure jabber raw (14131) is checked.

All the MUC protocol is described in JEP-0045

Notifications

By default, message in a group chat are notified with the "not important message" notification. If someone types your nick in the channel, the message will be highlighted, and the "highlight" notification will be emitted.

The Highlight plugin takes all its value in group chat. Go into the "configure plugins" menu, and enable highlight. You can add filters to match someword or regular expression in a chat and you can change the notification level of such messages.

Thus, you can stay idle in a groupchat and be notified when someone talks about a subject you are interested in.