A major annoyance in instant messaging is the amount of spam prevalent in the Yahoo and MSN networks these days. Largely because of the “email as contact name” paradigm, these contact addresses are easily scrapped from websites. We don’t like it any more than you do.

In an attempt to combat this, I’ve created a plugin called Challenge/Response. It works by hiding messages from unknown users until the user answers a question you have picked. For example, you can set your message as, “What is the square root of 49 in numerical form?” Until the unknown user answers “7″ all of their messages are hidden from you. 

Unknown users are those not on your contact list, not in the C/R white-list, and those you do not have a chat window open for. If set to do so, C/R will log the messages you receive to a group chat. It can also hide messages from all blocked users, for protocols like MSN where blocking only hides status information.

Since spam bots can’t read the challenge, it’s unlikely for them to respond and get past the filtering system. The downside is that people who want to talk to you for the first time may be confused or unable to answer; by making your challenge and response easier, you can avoid this problem.

Challenge/Response isn’t being included as part of Adium because it’s more of a band-aid than an actual solution, and because presenting it as a third-party plugin allows it a few luxuries that being a core part of Adium wouldn’t allow it. Eventually I’d like to see some sort of intelligent filter which is able to tell the difference between spam and non-spam messages, possibly with something like a Bayesian filter used by e-mail clients.

If you run into any bugs, or have any suggestions, feel free to make a comment here or on the Xtras page for the plugin. Since we don’t have an in-app way of updating plugins yet, check back on the site every once in a while to make sure you’re using the latest version. Enjoy.

The Wall Street Journal is running an article entitled “Making IM Services Play Well Together” that features a review of Adium and other applications that allow you to use multiple IM accounts simultaneously.

Adium, www.adiumx.com, wins points for cuteness. The downloaded program is represented by a goofy, green duck, which plops itself in the Mac operating system dock and closes its eyes when not in use. When new messages are received via Adium, this duck flaps its wings until you open the message. The Adium user interface incorporates sleek visuals, such as status windows that gracefully float above user names whenever a cursor moves over these names.

On behalf of the Adium team, I’d like to welcome Ryan Govostes, our newest developer, to the project. No longer must I sleep with the light on, shivering in terror at PPC disassembly. Ryan has been contributing to the project for several years, contributing both code and expertise, and I’m personally thrilled to have him on board.

Mazel tov, Ryan

As of May 13th, 2008 AIHyperlinks, the framework responsible for Adium’s link detection, has been renamed to AutoHyperlinks and set free.

The framework has officially been relicensed under the modified BSD license, allowing Mac developers - large and small - to use our framework in their own projects, both open and closed source, for their hyperlink gathering and autolinkification needs.

So, I’d like to challenge you, Mac developers: changing all the http://’s from a string into links is the most obvious use for it, but I’m really curious what the Mac developer community at large can do with our little framework.

Interested? Read our AutoHyperlinks wiki page, grab the source, give back (if you’d like), and have at it!

Good news, Facebook fans! I’ve just finished adding Facebook Chat support to Adium for the next release

The deadline for Google Summer of Code proposals is today at 1700 Pacific (12:00 AM UTC 1 April, 2008). This is a great opportunity for students to get involved in open source through a paid summer internship sponsored by Google. Do you want to know more?

Adium is a finalist in the CNET 2008 Webware 100 Awards in the communications category. Voting doesn’t require any registration so just takes a moment; please consider casting a vote for your favorite duck-themed instant messaging client!

AOL announced Open AIM 2.0 today, and we’ve had a number of people ask what this means for Adium. I spoke with Michael Hall of instantmessagingplanet.com earlier today; AOL Opens AIM Some More has an explanation of Open AIM and some of my comments on the topic.

Chris Forsythe, aka The_Tick , is retiring from the position of Adium Project Manager after 3 years of hard work in that capacity and several years before that of deep involvement in the Adium community. As Project Manager, Chris helped ensure that the diverse assets of the community - web site, support network, forums, etc. - ran smoothly and aided in directing the project itself. On behalf of the team and all who have benefited from his dedicated efforts, I’d like to thank Chris heartily

Eric Richie , who wrote the in-application help for Adium and heads the Ticket Task Force, has volunteered to step up into the position and is the new Adium Project Manager.

I did in fact solve the problems we were having with Adium’s install of buildbot. It turns out that because of some security features of Mac OS X, I needed to start the buildbot process from an actual Terminal window on that machine, not from ssh. You can read about all this (and much, much more!) in this technote.

A big thank you to everyone who helped out, especially Keith, Rob and Ben.