[Standards-JIG] XEP-191

[Greg Hudson]

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 20:24 +1100, Daniel Noll wrote:
> > This is the ancient debate between "polite blocking" (you don't know
> > that I'm blocking you) and "impolite blocking" (you're a loser so I'm
> > blocking you). Probably it makes sense for this to be a service-level
> > policy or a user-configurable setting.
> 
> Is that really the right way around?

I was involved in the IMPP working group, and while I didn't coin the
term "polite blocking," I think it's intended to be somewhat
tongue-in-cheek.  Recall that these specifications are all written by
engineers, to whom the term "polite" may not always have positive
connotations. :)

Regardless of whether it's "polite," it's always going to be possible to
silently black-hole someone's messages (in the receiving client if
nowhere else), and there are definitely going to be users who want to
respond to a presence subscription as if they are honoring it, but
always appear to be offline to that subscriber in order to avoid a
confrontation.