What are the 2x status menu items that only have '.' in their titles?

My status menu looks like this:

Available
Chatty
Extended away
Do not disturb
- separator -
.
.
I am not here right now
I am not here right now
- separator -
New status
Saved statuses

Why are there two literal periods and what are they supposed to mean?

Those are one that you created. If you clicked on saved statuses they should how up there, or there were just statuses you created that had . as a message.

I’d be damned if I did. I do not do this kind of stuff.
Do you mean these?

As I mentioned, they could be status that you created on the fly, which we call transient statuses that just had a message of ..

If they are transient, then why do they not disappear after Pidgin restart?

They should reappear during a restart just like the “I am not here right now” ones.

It looks like I have to ask this explicitly: how can they be permanently deleted?

They get rotated out after you user other statuses. If you want to manually get rid of them immediately, you’ll need to close the program and then edit the status.xml file which is in the profile directory that is in an os dependent location.

Rotated? What is that?

There’s like 5, i’m not sure on the exact number, transient/recent statuses. Once you add a 6th the oldest one goes away, or gets rotated out.

Nobody adds anything. Nobody uses that menu beyond very seldom flipping Available/Offline and back, if ever. But I have a bunch of confused users for whom these dot entries appear and stay. I had them go through the manual process of clearing elements from their status.xml.
Is there a sound reason for them not to show up in the Saved Statuses dialog? Assuming of course that the purpose of that dialog is to display saved statuses, of which we cannot be sure not being this software’s developers.

If there is a reason why they don’t show up in the saved status dialog, its been lost to time.

Developers should be able to debug their code and find this out as well as to develop a bugfix.

As I’ve told you before, Pidgin 2 is in maintenance mode, all of our efforts are going towards Pidgin 3 where this subsystem as well as just about everything else, has been rewritten from scratch. Us spending time on these 10+ year old bugs is not a good use of anyone’s time.

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If you keep building on the same code base and do not find out the root cause, you will keep the same bugs.
Why the pushback? You sound annoyed by bug reports. What’s the point in developing then?

You are describing a feature you don’t like as a bug. When that code was written people would frequently switch their status message and that list kept track of them. There probably should have been a way to delete them, but as far as I’m aware, it has never come up until now.

That said, as I’ve been telling you repeatedly, Pidgin 2.x has been in hard maintenance mode for over a year and a half. And was basically in a hard maintenance mode for years before the official announcement. I will quote the import part of the post here for clarity:

As implied earlier, maintenance mode isn’t the focus of the team. The team will work on it if a security issue or a pretty bad bug is identified, but otherwise we just kind of let it sit since it is in a working state. However, the majority of the work when something is in maintenance mode actually comes from outside of the core development team.

The Pidgin developers are a small team of volunteers and have been focusing our time on the next major release. See Pidgin 3.0.0 Experimental 1 Announcement.

This is the point of what we are developing.

Point to one of them and press the Delete key.

Thanks a lot!
I am astonished that someone who seems to be on the dev team was unwilling to offer this simple solution and instead chose to shower me with canned replies and strong language:

Thanks for nothing, grim.

Not everyone involved with Pidgin knows everything. @grim would have given you that solution if he knew it. I have been involved with Pidgin longer than he has and at one time knew the status system better than anyone else still involved, and I didn’t know it.

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The amount of effort you put into pushback, circling the wagons, and bouncing users off to other venues greatly exceeds that which is needed to make Pidgin better. Currently, Pidgin is less than user-friendly, less than clear, and less than bug-free, yet you do not want to listen and constantly and persistently push back and use strong language to deny any possibility of improvement. That’s how you come across, from the user’s perspective. We feel unwanted here.