We have released Adium 1.5.10. Most importantly, it features an updated version of libpurple, the library which provides network-level connectivity for most services in Adium, fixing many security issues.

Also among the changes is a fix for a problem that could cause high CPU load when a connection is lost. It became a particularly common problem with the lingering Yahoo connection issue we are looking into.

For more details on the changes in Adium 1.5.10, you can read the release notes.

Yahoo! has made a change on their server that prevents Adium 1.3.4 and the 1.4 betas from connecting. We have released a new beta, beta 7, which contains the fix.

As we’ve noted before, 1.4 will require Leopard. Those of you who are still hanging on to Tiger are currently stuck, as we do not yet have a fixed version for you. We’ll release a 1.3.5 shortly after Libpurple 2.5.7 comes out, as that version will also contain the fix. (Libpurple, for those of you who don’t know, is the library Adium uses to connect to Yahoo! and most other services.) The Adium 1.4 betas use pre-release versions of Libpurple 2.6.

Four days ago, many of our users started getting disconnected from Yahoo! after several hours. The disconnection comes in the form of an authorization error, so Adium responds by presenting a password prompt:

This is not new in 1.3.1: We released 1.3.1 on September 7th, so it was working fine for nearly two weeks before the problems started. It’s not specific to Adium: Pidgin users are reporting the same problems. Our users are reporting that the official Yahoo! Messenger client does not get disconnected, so it seems to be a fault in Libpurple, the library that Pidgin and Adium both use.

Furthermore, we stress that Adium has not forgotten your password. As shown above, Adium fills in your old password. This is so that, if the error is spurious (as in this case), you can just hit OK. This is not a security risk, as you can’t cut or copy from the password field:

What can you do? Just hit OK. The periodic disconnections are a hassle, but you should still be able to chat.

Meanwhile, we and the Libpurple developers are still investigating the specific cause of the problem, so we know who needs to fix what.

What we need from you is information. Here are the things we already know:

• You’ll get disconnected after about six to eight hours (sometimes more, sometimes less).
• If you use the official Yahoo! Messenger, you won’t get disconnected.
• If you use Pidgin, you will get disconnected.
• If you use Finch, you will get disconnected.
• It will ask for your password, even if you have it saved in the Keychain.
• It does not forget your password. (You can tell because it’s filled in in the password prompt. If Adium had forgotten your password, it wouldn’t be filled in.)

We know that a lot of you are experiencing problems. Please don’t leave a comment just to say “me too”. We already know about the problem; its existence is not in question, so we don’t need more evidence that it exists.

Here are the things we do need to know:

• Debug Window output. We have some, but more is always better.
• Whether any other clients have the same problem. If you use a client that isn’t based on Libpurple, and either have or don’t have the problem in that client, we could really use that information. The Pidgin developers have a list of clients that use Libpurple.

Please do not post this information as a comment on this post—we will ignore it. Please post it on our ticket instead.

With your help, we hope to have this problem resolved soon.

(Co-written with Project Manager Eric Richie.)

Adium 1.2.3 is now available. This is a quick bugfix release which exists primarily to address an issue in Adium 1.2.2 which prevented Yahoo! Messenger accounts with non-@yahoo.com usernames from connecting. It also fixes failures with certain additional message styles from AdiumXtras and corrects a few other minor issues with Adium 1.2.x. The version history has the details. Quack on!

A number of you have reported being unable to sign into Yahoo! using Adium 1.2.2. We’ve discovered the problem; this post is to tell you what we did wrong and what we’re doing about it.

When you enter a Yahoo! email address (such as jdoe@yahoo.com) into the username field in Adium 1.2 and later, Adium strips off the @yahoo.com part before trying to sign in with it. This is because Yahoo! expects only the jdoe part (the username); signing in with the whole email address will result in an unknown-username error.

Back on the 11th of February, Evan committed this change:

Yahoo accounts shouldn’t include the @domain.suffix regardless of what it is (e.g. @yahoo.com, @yahoo.it). Generalize our removal to account for this.

Before that change, we looked for “@yahoo.com” specifically, and removed it if present. This didn’t work for other Yahoo! suffixes, such as “@yahoo.it”. Thus, Evan intended to make Adium delete all Yahoo! suffixes, not just the US one.

The code that Evan committed removes any email-address suffix—in other words, if there’s an @, Adium will remove that and anything after it before trying to log in. This was a good plan, except for those who use Yahoo! AT&T.

SBC was a US telephone company, which became AT&T back in 2005. SBC offered, and AT&T still offers, an internet connection with Yahoo! services bundled, including Yahoo! Messenger. Instead of a plain old “jdoe” username, these customers’ Yahoo! IDs are their entire “jdoe@sbcglobal.net” address. For these users, stripping off the “@sbcglobal.net” suffix makes sign-in not work.

So, this is a regression. I’ve already committed a fix: we now only strip the suffix if the suffix starts with “@yahoo.”, so that “@yahoo.com”, “@yahoo.it”, etc. will be stripped but “@sbcglobal.net” won’t). That fix is present in what will be 1.2.3. While we’re at it, we know of a couple other regressions which we’ll also fix in 1.2.3.

Thanks for your patience, everyone.