autoblock.so

I recently tried out the Gaim plugin, which offers regular expression matching to automatically block nicknames or messages. While it's worth noting that the plugin only works with Yahoo chat rooms at the moment, this was not a major concern for me as Yahoo is the primary chat room I visit using Gaim.

The installation process was relatively straightforward. I simply copied the autoblock.c and autoblock.h files to the /path/to/gaim/sources/plugins directory and entered "PLUGIN_LIBS=-lpcre make autoblock.so" to initiate the installation process. Once the installation was complete, I copied the autoblock.so file to my Gaim plugins directory (which in my case was ~/.gaim/plugins).

To help save time, the plugin provides two files, ab_nicks.txt and ab_messages.txt, that already contain a list of blocked messages and bots that get rid of most of the spam that I encountered in chat rooms. After copying them to my Gaim home directory (~/.gaim on unices), they were ready to use.

What's great about this release is that it fixed a couple of problems that existed in previous versions. First, the issue of blocking IM's even when not chatting was resolved. Additionally, the hang/crash when a non-yahoo IM is received is also fixed. However, it should be noted that some preferences that were previously available are no longer available due to changes in the Gaim API and program flow.

Overall, I found the Gaim plugin to be a useful tool in protecting me from unwanted spam and bots in chat rooms. The installation process was easy to follow, and the new update fixed some issues that existed in earlier versions.