Having problems with duplicate IM notifications? Try 'reset'

The short: If you get duplicate notifications in IM, try typing sending 'reset' to the bot. This should clear up the dupplication problems.

The long:

If you are using an external IM provider, such as gmail, we sometimes run into issue with knowing whether you are online or not. Since we try to respect 'Away' status of each of your connections, we send your messages to each one of your connections.

An artifact of this is that if a connection isn't alive anymore, the server will take the undelivered message and send it to all other connections. This happens most frequently with the gtalk web widget, because it creates a new connection each time you go to gmail.com and doesn't always seem to notify when you leave gmail.com. So you may end up with 2-3 phantom gtalk connections and one real one. Next time you get a message, it will fail on the phantom ones and resend to the real one, which results in 3 copies of the same notification.

'reset' will force our server to re-query every connection and clear them out if they don't reply. This should happen automatically already, but unfortunately, we don't always get the message from gtalk, so we have to resort to manual querying. For now 'reset' is something you need to do manually, but we'll update our server to do periodic re-queries so you won't even get into this situation anymore