MSN plugin is broken again, fix-solution for developers

[vultures]

Microsoft hasn't released the sources for this? 

[Vulpix]

MSN never released sources for any of these. It's all been pretty much reverse engineering and "listening" in on the protocol ^_^;

[vultures]

Another concern about it - tens of thousands of users who are at leisure with Miranda and its plugins, yet no petition for releasing the sources.
FYI, at least half-a-dozen petition sites gather votes for "bringing back" MSN to its customers.

It would be polite from the people @MS to at least consider stepping up and resolving this, by the looks of it, huge issue.

[Robyer]

These petitions will do nothing. Same as asking for releasing the sources.

Microsoft announced these changes maybe a year ago and they are just "merging" skype and msn together to new protocol. We just need to wait until it's "finished" and then until someone will reverse-engineer that protocol :-)

[jonwil]

How come no-one has bothered to reverse engineer this newer protocol standard?
Or is it tied to the same reasons people haven't reverse engineered the Skype protocol? (or rather that those who have tried have been forced to stop by legal threats from Microsoft)

[White-Tiger]

Well.. it's not really dead yet and there's known stuff about it. I also played around and got our MSN plugin to login using the newer MSNP21 protocol (but thats it, no contacts etc. don't have time for that)

So one could "simply" upgrade to MSNP21 and have it once more for a few months.. But actually it would be required to get hands on current implementations of Skype and use that instead.. so that would of course be called Skype and not MSN. So the MSN plugin is likely dead by now.
I have no Idea how hard it might be to get into the new Skype protocol.. It's almost no problem as long as one can use a proxy and when it's still text based. But it could be more complicated than that.

[Robyer]

Or is it tied to the same reasons people haven't reverse engineered the Skype protocol?

Skype was too complicated to reverse-enginner. Microsoft moving from this old complcated Skype protocol to new protocol (based on old MSN protocol) is good for alternative clients.

Someone already started reverse-engineering and docummenting it, see http://wiki.dequis.org/projects/msn/

But last update is from dec 2014. Could someone say whether it's useful or usable at all? :-)

Oh, new link is here: https://github.com/msndevs/protocol-docs/wiki

[aekotra]

There is work being done on SkypeWeb.

https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypeweb

[Robyer]

unsane and others are already working on Skype plugin based on SkypeWeb. 

[calabar]

unsane and others are already working on Skype plugin based on SkypeWeb. 

That's great, thanks to the developers!

A question: does it will require to convert the MSN contact in a Skype contact? (I avoided to do the conversion in the past because I feared that the converted contact would not longer worked with the MSN plugin for Miranda)

[Vulpix]

unsane and others are already working on Skype plugin based on SkypeWeb. 

Seems there is a new taskforce for skypeweb! MikalaiR ! If he is reading the forums, thanks for all the effort; I know quite a few people who use miranda and would use it for skype when possible.

[Whiplash]

unsane and others are already working on Skype plugin based on SkypeWeb. 

What does this mean? Will it be possible to use Skype via Miranda NG, but without installing the Skype itself?

[Robyer]

Whiplash, yes. I'm not sure about audio/video calls, but classic conversations will be supported (and probably already are at some alpha stage)

[Dimsok]

Why it was updated if it doesn't work anymore?

[Vulpix]

As explained in the other topic, likely due to the fact that one of the underlying options was changed in core and all of the plugins were amended in a "replace all occurences of X with Y" mode, sort of. The MSN plugin itself or its internal logic has not really been updated.