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ICQ Starts Blocking Alternative Clients
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that since yesterday ICQ has blocked access to the ICQ network to alternative clients. Users of QIP, Adium, and other clients are getting a 'The client version you are using is too old. Please upgrade'. No comment yet from ICQ or AOL."
In other news... people still use ICQ?
No problems here using Miranda IM. (http://www.miranda-im.org/)
That said, the forum thread is interesting. Looks like the ICQ admins are censoring posts.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
The one thing AOL has always excelled at is cutting off its nose to spite its face. Though I am rather grateful for all those nice, metal disc boxes which I spray-painted in solid colors (for more worthy discs). They really look great.
Caveat Utilitor
Actually, they're forcing windows users to upgrade.. It has nothing to do with blocking alternative clients.
In other news, GnomeICU still works and pidgin has just made a new release with sends a newer version number.
And working just fine at this very moment.
I got the "your client is too old" message today, did a manual "check for updates" and found that a new version of Adium (1.2.6) was released and after upgrading ICQ works again.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Kopete fixed this, well, you have to edit a config file, but once you do that it works fine on Kopete.
I was getting this earlier, but the latest seems to connect just fine.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
Adium 1.2.6 is now out which fixes ICQ connectivity.
What I like is if you go to the tech forum on ICQ referred to in initial post you'll see that most if not all workarounds have been edited out by ICQ....nice.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
My recent usage, on only one machine but my main workstation for the past 2-1/2 years, gives the following reports from du for my Adium log folder:
Note that I only used MSN and Yahoo for a long time, and added AIM just a few years ago when I moved to a state where apparently everyone is on AIM. I think that there are regional trends for one network to be more popular than others. This probably has to do with the first few people in a particular high school or college starting with one IM network and nobody in that school bothering with the others since they all told their friends "Get X!"
Kopete updates its version file automatically, so no need to edit anything. Kopete will do it for you.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
Oh crap. Between my Slashdot ID and my ICQ number, now even I realize how old I'm getting! I bet you kids don't even remember Napster itself!
AIM and ICQ have been the same network for a long time. I use the AIM transport in Jabber, but I use my old ICQ account and so everyone I talk to on AIM is talking to an ICQ user.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I stopped using ICQ earlier this year when my low-seven digit account number was hijacked. ICQ provides ZERO methods of getting hijacked accounts back.
Well, on the topic of forcing people to upgrade... maybe if the newer software wasn't so retarded, more people would upgrade. Just a thought.
Admittedly my anecdote isn't comprehensive marketing data and isn't that new either, but just to illustrate a point. So at one point I wanted to communicate with someone who supposedly had only ICQ.
The last version I had used before was, IIRC, 2002a. Or something. At any rate, it was a relatively clean interface, with just the two text-fields needed, and the minimum of buttons that one might need. All in the Windows configured colours, and with sensible icons that are there, but don't scream for attention and don't look like someone flew an airplane into a clown makeup factory. I'm not necessarily a fan of ICQ or AOL, but I could respect that interface.
Well, I figured, wth, let's get the newest version. You know, what with potential security holes and whatnot in older versions. I think the version at the moment was ICQ 4. "With Xtraz!" The l33t (ok, SMS-speak) spelling in a product name should have been warning enough. It was everything that the old version wasn't: retarded and annoying and looking like a desperate scream for attention. IIRC with an ad banner thrown in for good measure too.
I actually went "oh, fuck the security holes, that's why I have an anti-virus and data execution check turned on." I actually uninstalled it and dug through old backup CD-R's to find my trusted old version.
Well, I uninstalled it completely after a few days and never looked back. So I wouldn't know if the even newer versions fixed that or continued down that slope towards software-Alzheimer's.
But just saying... if you find that you have to _force_ people to give up their old versions and use the newer one, even when it's for free (as in beer;)... there may be some subtle hint in there.
And yeah, I know there are other programs one can use instead of the official client. They're just kinda irrelevant for the point I was trying to make, which is about AOL making the users of its official client upgrade.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Probably worse than torture. They normally don't make you look at popout adds while needles are pushed under your nails.
I'll miss ICQ when they shut it down. I haven't gotten a real message from it in years (I think - I don't really pay attention to which service in Kopete I'm getting messages from), but I can't bring myself to stop connecting.
I have a very low 7-digit ID from right after it came out. It was pretty cool to be able to randomly chat with friends without having to log into an IRC channel and wait for them to remember to come online. One time I even bought a girl a computer for Valentine's Day just so I could talk to her while I was at my ISP tech support job; we ended up getting married.
ICQ sucks and it's spammy and doesn't do anything cool, but there's a lot of nostalgia in that crusty old system. I'll be sad the day when my login stops working for the last time.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
In Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, ICQ is basically the only instant messenging protocol. (A few tech-savvy Russians have started switching to Jabber, but even they still maintain ICQ accounts to talk to their less technically inclined friends.) Not having an ICQ number in Russia is sort of like not having an email address in the US; people will look at you funny.
ICQ, the one IM app that doesn't send you a message every time someone hits enter, it promotes that they should finish their idea first before clicking the Send button, so the recipient doesn't have to read the same line over and over because they keep seeing blinking or hearing "message received" noises. The only blinking you see with this program is a tiny icon in the system tray instead of multiple taskbar panes blinking in a very distracting un-synchronized way.
Yes, you can configure your clients differently, but I'm talking about the default behavior. And even if you are courteous enough to not set it to send your message every time you press enter, your friends won't, and you'll still be getting one-liners that could have waited until they were finished typing their whole idea.
Twinstiq, game news
Uh-oh! ... memories...
This is just an incremental version update. For the licq client at least, it's a one-byte fix in /usr/bin/licq
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife