Some servers, mainly on the XMPP protocol, send a fixed part of the chat history to each client, regardless of whether or not the client has already received those messages. This plugin for libpurple clients, such as Pidgin or finch, sets the history_since property of a chat when a message is received. When connecting to the server the next time, the XMPP protocol plugin uses this property to tell the server to exclude messages before that timestamp from the history.

Purple History Since is not limited to XMPP, but it is the only libpurple protocol plugin known to use the history_since property.

For the binary version, extract all the contents of purple-history-since in the ZIP file either to the installation directory of Pidgin (typically C:\Program Files\Pidgin) or to your .purple user directory (typically %APPDATA%\Roaming\.purple).

See below for how to compile the source code version into a binary ZIP file.

To install the plugin on Linux you need to extract a release tarball and compile it from source:

sudo apt install pidgin-dev
./configure
make
sudo make install

Note: By default the plugin will be installed to /usr/local. If you installed Pidgin through your package manager, it is most likely installed into /usr (i.e. which pidgin returns /usr/bin/pidgin). Use ./configure --prefix=/usr in this case.

Note: When you use the repository directly or one of those auto-generated "Source code" archives, you need to run ./autogen.sh before running ./configure.

In order to build the plugin for Windows an already-compiled source tree of Pidgin is required. Please see the Pidgin for Windows Build Instructions for details.

After that you need to create a file named local.mak that points to the Pidgin source tree, e.g.:

PIDGIN_TREE_TOP=$(PLUGIN_TOP)/../../pidgin-2.10.11

Now you can build the plugin:

make -f Makefile.mingw

We love patches. ❤️ Please fork the project, do your changes and make a pull request.

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