Libera Wallops

Introduction

In December of 2021 libera.chat made a decision to turn on wallops by default for all users. The Pidgin project has no stance on this change, but a few users have asked us how to disable it.

Unfortunately there isn’t a way to do this in a stock Pidgin install, but the IRC More plugin in the Purple Plugin Pack is up to the task.

Installation

The Purple Plugin Pack has been around for a very long time so it’s probably already available to you in the usual way that you install packages.

For Windows users, you can download a zip file of all the plugins from here. To complete installation please see the README.txt inside of the zip file.

Enable The Plugin

Once you have the plugin installed you will need to enable it in the Plugins Dialog via the Tools -> Plugins menu item in the Buddy List window. You don’t need to restart Pidgin as it will check for new plugins when you open the Plugins Dialog.

Scroll down until you find IRC More and check the box to enable the plugin.

Once the IRC More plugin is enabled you can close the Plugins Dialog.

Configuration

Each IRC account is configured independently, so you’ll need to open the Account Edit Dialog for your Libera.chat account. There’s number of ways to do this, but the easiest is to select the Accounts -> Manage Accounts menu item in the Buddy List window.

With the Accounts dialog open, find your Libera.chat account and select it. Then click the Modify... button and you should be presented with a dialog similar to the one shown here.

Click on the Advanced tab at the top. This is where the IRC More plugin has added the additional settings.

In the Unset User Modes On Connect text box, we want to enter a single w. By entering this w we are telling the IRC More plugin to turn off the see wallops mode that is now turned on by default while connecting.

You can now click on Save which will close the dialog. However, remember that IRC More only unsets that mode while connecting to that IRC account so it has not yet turned it off.

Verifying

The easiest way to verify that everything is setup correctly is to reconnect your Libera.chat account and verify that you no longer have that mode set. To do this, you can quickly disable and enable your Libera.chat account in the Accounts Window.

Verification is a little bit tricker as Pidgin doesn’t typically show these kinds of messages to users. So the first thing we need to do is open the Debug Window via the Help -> Debug Window menu item in the Buddy List window.

Once that’s open, find any conversation window in Pidgin that is from your Libera.chat account. Once you have found one, type /mode <your-username> into the input box of that conversation, replacing <your-username> with whatever your username is on Libera.chat. Be sure to hit enter to send the command.

Now back in the Debug Window you should see a new line like the following:

(06:21:14) irc: Unrecognized message: :calcium.libera.chat 221 grim-demo +Zi

This output says that the current user modes are Z and i which means this user was connected via TLS and will be hidden from who and whois commands from normal users.

Since there is no w that means we successfully disabled the see wallops mode, which means you are now done and can close the Debug Window!

Additional Reading

You can find more information about additional user modes on Libera.chat in their documentation.