I was trying to add my Skype account to my forum profile but I ran into an issue. Skype accounts bound to Microsoft accounts get a Skype name in the form of 'live:some_name', which the forum doesn't seem to want to acknowledge as a valid Skype name, presumably because of the presence of the colon in the name itself. Fixing the issue should be fairly easy, since it's just a matter of adding a clause for the 'live:' prefix; assuming the forum uses a standard regex string to filter the input, adding '(live?' to the beginning should solve the issue. That is unless there's a notable difference in API for the two, which I strongly doubt. I'm also quite certain that describing the process of fixing this was entirely unnecessary, but I felt like doing it anyhow. :derpe:
I haven't created a skype account in this fashion, but will you still get recognized by the skype app if you omit the live: ?
The name without the live: prefix refers to an older Skype account I made an no longer use. Sent from my SGH-T899M using Tapatalk
Well isn't MS so kind. I would have assumed that since the skype URI is still skype:, it would make sense to me that Microsoft would not expect people to have to account for skype:live:username, and that they would accommodate any of those prefixes on their end... Anyway, vB does not use simple regex for those fields. A function is used to strip any or deny those chars before sending it off to the database. You can briefly see here if you were curious. I can see if there's anything I can do for this, as this is a rather dumb oversight on MS's part clearly, but I can't make any promises right now simply because I have never looked into how they actually go about handling special chars. The uglier way I could easily get around this, is I'd just make another field w/ regex, but that a bit of a meh solution.
Well, I can see two simple intimidate solutions, the first being to make an additional column that either stores the live equivalent name or a flag indicating it's a live: prefixed name, and simply checking for that. The second hackier but easier solution is to trim the live: and prefix some arbitrary string of characters that designates the name as one with the prefix, then removing it and re-appending live during page generation. Both aren't exactly perfect. Honestly, I think searching through the vB forums might be the best option, someone's bound to have run into this before.
Those are all fine, around the lines of what I was thinking, it's just ...finding what I need in the sea of non-commented code and poorly organized documentation that is vBulletin. :derpe: As you said, we may need to wait around until someone makes a patch or plugin of sorts and knows what they're doing a lot better than myself. Humorously enough, from what I've been reading they managed to break a lot of Smart TV's and similar devices with built in skype as well. Edit: Something else to note. Try putting your name into mystatus.skype.com/username. You'll see that any live: prefixed names won't even parse there either. I'm of the notion that they haven't handled this merger with Live in any decent fashion at all yet...
Thank you for bringing this to my attention and thanks to the pair of you for educating me a little on this through your little chat. Based on that gleamed knowledge, it sounds like this is going to be a slightly slow wait for Skype and Windows to finally become one. I can update the systems we currently have as best as I can while doing a little nosing around for what solutions have arrived in the time between now and when this was raised. For the meantime, I'll try adding the prefix to the addon but it sounds like it might not all that well if the integration is still shoddy. I'll give you a nudge when I'm done.
Just as a final note, after nosing around a bit, at this point the Live and Facebook Skype integration don't seem to work, but only for online status. Other relevant things work fine apparently.
Well, the oldest thread referencing the issue is on the Skype forums, posted some time September. The general consensus seems to be to contact Skype support, but the general consensus on that is they're useless.
Well, the only distinctly broken part is the Online/Offline status API. Everything else should theoretically work.
[MENTION=7134]Wintermute[/MENTION], thought I should come back and attempt to re-tackle this problem. Found it within 5 minutes of looking...funny how that happens eh? And it ended up being a stupid regex after all, I was looking in all the wrong places...go me. Anyway, see if you can add your skype name now.
@mike406 It's seems to be working in part now, in that I was able to add my account to my profile. I think the colon broke the parts that actually use the name in the url (at least in Firefox) in 2 places, Spoiler: Images However, I can now put up my skype name, which is good. Thanks!
Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, the image src breaks because the mystatus/online/whatever functionality of the API doesn't work with live: prefixed names (http://mystatus.skype.com/smallicon/live:registrar_scratch). I'll see if I can do something for that, replace it with a generic skype icon for anybody using a live: prefixed name or whatever. Edit: Done, except for the second one on the popup, but I don't particularly care about that one. #lazy
