I hated it in the open source chat application Retroshare so much that instead of using a pre-compiled version I edited the source to disable the activity send

I hated it in the open source chat application Retroshare so much that instead of using a pre-compiled version I edited the source to disable the activity send notifications from my client. After doing that I noticed the function actaully sent the message "etc etc is typing..." and you could change that message to arbitrary strings. Unaltered clients then display the arbitrary string instead of a "is typing" one.