The thing you shouldn't do

... as an application developer, is to refuse to listen your user base.

As you can read here Pidgin developers thinks they are above common mortals. In pidgin 2.4, a new feature was added: the message entry box resize bar was removed out in favor of automatic resizing.

Users wanted it back, but developers released new Pidgin versions without reintegrating the resize feature, and then what happened ? Pidgin was forked to Carrier. It would have been so easy to add a option for the different users with different needs.

What makes us different from the official client, is that we work for you. Unlike the Pidgin developers, we believe the user should have the final say in what goes into the program.

Not listening to end users is a shame for the open source community.