This might seem a silly question but if you block a contact but do not delete them from your contact list, can you still see when they come on and offline?

When you block a contact but keep them in your contact list, the contact name still appears in your contact list but it has the red "no entry - blocked" symbol which overlaps the greyed out X symbol. If the blocked contact comes online, will the grey X symbol change to the online 'Tick' symbol underneath the red blocked sign?

Many thanks in advance!

Information on blocking people

If you remove from contacts a previously authorised person, can they:
Q1) See you online?
A1) Yes they will still see you online

Q2) Contact you?
A2) They can contact you if you have either allow all contact or allow those you have authorised, but not if you have 'contacts only' and each of these can be set separately for calls or chats.

Q3) Blocked Users
A3) blocked users cannot contact you or see you online in any circumstances unless you have enabled your status to be shown on the web, that URL is not, and can not, be filtered by Skype username as per the privacy options.

Q4) Will other people notice, that I have removed them from my contact list?
A4) No, they won't

When you block somebody, they goes back to ?mark!
Until it’s removed from this list, a Skype user who is blocked will be unable to see the status of or communicate with the user who blocked them.
Users who have been blocked may be unblocked at any time by the user who put the
block in place, simply by removing the blocked user’s name from the blocking list and re-requesting authorization again.

With regard to authorisations:
Authorizations are stored on both sides. So if you had already asked this contact for authorization previously, his/her client has remembered it, and if you now ask again, the response is returned automatically without popping up anything for the remote side, since you already have been authorized previously.

Thanks Rocketman for the standard reply re: blocking which has been cut and pasted many, many times in the forum to any question that mentions 'blocking' but it doesn't actually answer my question.....or perhaps I didn't explain myself properly ;-)

The Person has NOT been removed from the contacts list.

The Person has been blocked and I already understood that they won't be able to see the person who's blocked them online; that wasn't my question.

My question is whether you could actually tell when the blocked person is online as they still appear on your contacts list albeit with a red blocked sign overlapping their status sybol. I was curious as to whether the status symbol under the blocked red sign would change from a greyed out 'X' to a green 'Tick' when the blocked person comes online.

On msn, when you block someone, you can still see when they come off and online and I just wanted to know if it was the same with Skype.

Or is it simply the case that once you have blocked someone but leave them visible on your contact list, you can never tell when they come on and offline?

The definitive answer on this would be much appreciated.

That is my understanding as you have stated.

Thanks Rocketman.

Just a quick update. Whilst you can't see when the blocked person is online or not the box still pops up to tell you that the blocked person has come online. Just thought you might like to know this for future queries.

Thanks for the info. When you blocked this person did you also remove him/her from you contacts list if not this I think is why you still see the pop up.

Hi Rocketman. When I blocked this person, I didn't remove them from my contacts list, hence why the pop-up box alert probably still appears when the blocked person signs into Skype.

However, their online status symbol still remains as a greyed out X with the red blocked sign overlapping it so you can't actually tell if the person is online or not. It's a shame that Skype doesn't have this facility for blocked users as on msn, but the pop-up alert box at least lets you know when they sign in etc.

Ok, in the end Is the answer yes or no? I was about to ask the same question.
Damn it, It would be so easy and practical to put a fonction where we could choose our status FOR EACH CONTACT.

There are currently 2 people blocked but not removed from my contact list... people I was hoping to talk to WHEN I CHOSE TO, and would just ignore if I felt like it. But I guess we still dont have this option...

I am no programing expert but I don't think what you want is possible because the contact status is NOT server based like the other IM services, it is as you know peer2peer, therefore relying on the supernodes and the big Skype cloud for you to receive their status.