User:FunkyFish/wip/Documentation/Contact list
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Contact list
The list of your contacts is displayed to the left on the CenterIM main screen, and has a tree-like structure. There are "Online" and, unless the "Hide offline users" options is on, "Offline" nodes, groups (if switched on). If a user has a birthday today, a smiley face ":)" is shown next to his or her nickname.
If a contact is online, a status letter in square brackets is shown for him. Though, the brackets kind can vary. Besides the square ones, there can be {x} and <x> items. The former means a contact is on your invisible list, and the latter represents your "always visible" status for a contact.
Finally, if there is an unfinished (postponed) message for a certain contact, the ">" character will appear between status and nickname.
Finding and adding users
The most common way to add an IM contact to your list is to use the "find/add user(s)" dialog invoked from the global menu. First you have to find the contact you wanna add. CenterIM allows you to search for users with various parameters in various networks.
In ICQ, you can add a user knowing his UIN, or see a list of people matching your criteria. In fact, ICQ server sends only first 40 matching UINs, but usually it's quite enough.
Note that in ICQ search requests you can use simple wildcards in the text input fields. It's possible to put "*" there. For example, you don't remember my last name exactly, but know only several first letters. Then just type in a first name ("Konstantin") and fill in the "last name" field with "Klyag*". The same trick can be done with other fields: "city", "nickname", "company", etc..
The Yahoo!, AIM, IRC and Jabber networks support in CenterIM does only allow to add users by nicknames.
With IRC it's possible to get users from channels. For more info on channels and other IRC related stuff, please refer to http://www.irc.org/. So, with CenterIM you can either fetch a list of users for a specified channel, or (sic!) find users that stay on several channels simultaneously. To perform the latter, just put several channel names separated with spaces. For example, the "#CenterIM #linux" query will show a list of users that are currently talking on both channels.
Some useful hints
You can skip the finding step by issuing one of the following shell commands to add a user (depends on an IM type):
This one is for ICQ
$ mkdir ~/.centerim/<UIN of a user to add>
For Yahoo!
$ mkdir ~/.centerim/y<nickname>
For AIM
$ mkdir ~/.centerim/a<nickname>
For IRC
$ mkdir ~/.centerim/i<nickname>
For Jabber
$ mkdir ~/.centerim/j<nickname>
For MSN
$ mkdir ~/.centerim/i<msn-mailaddress>
Don't forget to restart CenterIM so that it re-reads the contact list.
Though, it's better anyway to follow the usual find/add procedure.
Another intresting ICQ related trick I wanna share with you. Because of a natural curiosity, sometimes names of people get me interested in finding out about their ethnical origin. Once I saw a last name, Aslam, which seemed like a Muslim one, but I had no idea which country the guy originated from. I decided to use ICQ to find out. Opened the "find/add" dialog and typed that in. After looking at several matched contacts I noticed the majority of people were from Pakistan, so I realized where the guy was from and my curiosity was satisfied.
I go the same way to find out in which country a certain city is located, and so on. This makes ICQ extremely useful for me. Just use your imagination to find other ways to use such a great statistics database :)
ICQ search specific modes
The "find/add users" dialog for ICQ besides the obvious parameters does also contain two interesting items such as "Random chat group" and "Keywords". With the help of the former you can easily look for chat partners from standard 10 groups, if you're bored or just feel like chatting with someone. You never know who can be there. Also, you can make yourself available for others so that they can find you in random chat groups. Just set the corresponding parameter in the "Update your details" dialog for ICQ.
The keyword search feature allows to search for contacts by specified keywords that are taken from interests, geographical location and other places, and indexed somehow by the Mirabilis guys. Quite an interesting feature too.
Removing users
Removing users is a very simple procedure. You can either hit DEL on a certain contact or select an appropriate item in the context menu. After confirmation the contact is removed.
Users' details
On the ICQ network, every user has a set of details that can be browsed and used in search queries by others. To browse details of a specific user on the contact list it's enough just to press '?' on a corresponding to a contact item.
Please don't hesitate to do it before asking people who they are. It takes time to explain, though it can be looked up so easily.
Groups of contacts
In case you have a lot of people on contact list, you might wish to be able to visually arrange them into groups. Choose any criteria. Geography, companies, activities, interests.. Anything. CenterIM supports it.
To turn the feature on invoke the configuration dialog and switch the "arrange contacts into groups" option value to "yes". By default, all of your contacts will appear on standard "Global" group from which you can move them to other groups creating them "on fly". There is an item in the context menu named "Move to group.." which allows you to do it.
It's also possible to collapse and expand groups by pressing the Enter key on them.
Remove, add and rename operations on groups can be done with the group manager dialog invoked from the global menu item named "Organize contact groups".
