It would be REALLY nice if kopete had a setting that prevented random yahoos from adding themselves to your contact/friends list. I am really tired of starting up KDE and seeing messages that some yahoo bonehead spammers have "added me" as a friend. I then look at the kopete window and see that my "Friends" folder now contains dozens and dozens of people who I do not know and do not WANT to know and mixed into the long list of spammer names/addresses are a few of my REAL friends. They are hard to find, however, because I have to scroll threw the scum first. I remove all these extraneous names/addresses AND blacklist them to no avail because the next time I fire up KDE and kopete starts up again there they are again, or if not the very same contacts that I previously deleted, merely subtly altered versions.

How about having kopete require that we actively accept friends rather than simply allowing every spammer/porn bot on earth (usually in russia) from adding themselves to your friends list?

Here's a short list of the scum, losers, idiots, and tards that keep being auto-added to my kopete friends folder:

danicalorio25@live.com
galemoglia19@live.com
harlenestewart82@live.com
irwindemarinis66@hotmail.com
konradreiser76@live.com
leslinason1@hotmail.com
lonnireid96@live.com

etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc

Have you checked under "Service Messages"? ( blue flag in the status bar )

At least for Jabber, it requires your approval for someone to add you.

I have looked at the services messages. The actual "friends" that are automatically forced upon me by kopete do not appear in the services messages. I DO get a lot of russians trying to add themselves to my contact list but at least I am able to block them and they don't appear. What is beyond my control is the friends list.

I have manually deleted the contactslist.xml file in the kopete directory to no avail. It comes back and so do all the unwanted contacts in the "Friends" folder. I have manually edited the contactslist.xml file to remove the meta-contact data for these offending entries but this doesn't last. After an hour or so I can check a running instance of kopete and see that they are all back again! I delete them in the kopete window AND blacklist them to no avail. They all come back again! W. T. F??!!

I am going to dump kopete and go with a proper and non-insane client that doesn't force contacts upon me. It sounds like jabber might be the client to use. Kopete flat-out sucks because of this nonsense.

I also can't seem to get Kopete to quit adding friends "russians" to my contact list. Is there a known bug or malware that is allowing them to pop back up even after I delete them.

In this case, if another client, such as KMess is unaffected, I would recommend filing a bug at bugs.kde.org.

If other clients, including the official client, are affected, then there is nothing you can do about it.

Jabber is a network type, much like Yahoo messenger, AIM, etc.