Timestamp on XMPP presence tag

This is great to see. I hope that we’ll see clients implementing this sooner rather than later.

I do have one question though. For this to work correctly will the clients on both ends as well as their associated servers be required to implement this before it will work? In other words will Google need to implement this feature in GTalk and their server before I will be able to see when a person on my roster that uses their service changed their status (I run my own ejabberd server and will have support before anyone else thanks to your hard work)?

Hi Mickaël, it’s good to see that you will support this—I agree that it will be very useful.

This is already done…  since like 2001.  Maybe later servers aren’t doing it, but certainly jabberd did/does.

In Psi, you can view the timestamp of presence in the tooltip of a contact.  Normally this timestamp is simply the time that the presence stanza was received, but if the presence stanza contains a timestamp within it then that value is used instead.

If ejabberd does not do this, well it would be great to see it. :)

Hello Justin,

Thank you for the feedback. I did not use jabberd1 probably since around this time ;)

Good to know there is something implemented in Psi, because it will help for testing on several clients.

My point was also that there is only a commonly agreed protocol for timestamp on presence since XEP-0203. I would also suggest that the XMPP council makes this use case explicit in the XEP-0203.

@Adam: The server that republish the presence needs to implement this feature.

You will not get timestamp from Google users for example unless they implement this, but they will get a timestamp from you.

@Mickaël: The previous commonly agreed upon standard is XEP-0091, Delayed Delivery, documenting the historic jabber:x:delay namespace. This is what jabberd has implemented for a long time now. The specification was deprecated in favour of XEP-0203 recently, because of ambiguities in the timestamp format.

Ok, Ralph.

Yes, XEP-0091 talks specificially about using timestamp to send “the last presence update sent by a connected node to a host.”. I did not look there because it was deprecated.

Thank you !

I wonder why my comment was lost… Maybe I forgot to Submit it after Preview…

If you want to know how long the user has been Away… XEP-0012: Last Activity and/or XEP-0256: Last Activity in Presence seem to do the job, don’t they.

@spike No the purpose of last activity (and last activity on presence which carries the same semantic) is to know how much time you have been idle. It does not tag your presence change.

The difference show for example when you talk with people that have not changed their presence since a long time (and forgot that their presence state is “going to sleep” for example). The user is not idle, but the presence is old and outdated.

Yeah, I know the purpose is different. Only in (auto-)away case, idle time seems (much more) useful information, OTOH presence timestamp (alone) seems useless. In all other cases, it’s the other way around, I guess.

Hello, jabberd2 add stamp to presence info:
/* stamp the saved presence so future probes know how old it is */
pkt_delay(pkt, time(NULL), jid_full(pkt->from));

So, I think that ejabberd MUST add this info, too, so I can see away time of my contact even if it’s client doesn’t support XEP-0012

Hello Yar,

For your information it has already been implemented.
See: Timestamp on presence part 2.