ICQ! aaahh!!!
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The main part about ICQ6 is a mess: the chat window.
1) Links which contain upper and lower-case letters are simply forwarded to the browser lower-case when clicking upon. You have to do a copy/paste into the browser to get it right. Duh.
2) US International keyboard doesn't help you write äöéè etc. because it just won't accept it and will write 'e `e etc. What ugly hack is in there for keyboard interaction?
Anyway, there is no tech support, just one "Message board for technical issues" where everyone posts problems and noone replies. At least noone official. Don't even talk about solutions. Does someone from the actual dev staff even read and care?
Oh and today, it won't even connect. Ok, this doesn't happen often, but the error message in this case is very helpful:
WTF
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It's a chat system that uses numbers instead of names to identify people. Enough said.
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The solution: Stop using ICQ.
Either switch to msn like everyone else, or use trillian or pidgin.
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People still use ICQ? How 1997.
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Most people in Czech republic use ICQ, not MSN, it depends on country. I was quite surprised to find out that ICQ is not as popular in other countries. And i presonally prefer Jabber.
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@asuffield said:
It's a chat system that uses numbers instead of names to identify people. Enough said.
Ahh, but that allows users to show just how '1337 they are, by having much lower UIDs than everyone else, thus demonstrating that they've been talking about masturbation to stangers in other countries since *back in the day.*
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ICQ is owned by AOL. That, by itself, should tell you that it's much more of a WTF than you can possibly imagine.
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@asuffield said:
It's a chat system that uses numbers instead of names to identify people. Enough said.
I loved ICQ back in college. The good old days when you could accept chats from random strangers without being barraged by spam.
I still have my chat client (Kopete on KDE these days) connect to my ICQ account, but everyone on my list is also on AIM so that account gets
used more.
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Oh well I won't use MSN/Windows Live Messenger becos it comes with Windows, but I guess you were ironic anyway :P
And those emoticons from ICQ4 and ICQ6, they are so cute :D
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I met many lonely single mothers in college using the random ICQ chat function. One even sent me a care package with home made cookies and a crayola drawing her son made.
I did not eat the cookies, though my younger brother did.
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ICQ used to be awesome. It was actually pretty revolutionary for the time. Real-time chat between multiple parties, sending game requests, offline message queueing, and so forth. We will ignore the fact that the ICQ client was incredibly insecure (my first experience with crackers involved a rather unpleasant experience with someone who was very insistant that I vote for them on some T100 thing). It was, on the whole, pretty cool. So AOL bought them, and let it languish horribly for the next decade, since it was a direct competator to AIM. If ICQ had remained independant, we'd probably all be using it instead of AIM or MSN.
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@shambo said:
I met many lonely single mothers in college using the random ICQ chat function. One even sent me a care package with home made cookies and a crayola drawing her son made.
I did not eat the cookies, though my younger brother did.
As long as she didn't follow it up with a video ending in "You're dumped. Enjoy the cookies."
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@Volmarias said:
ICQ used to be awesome. It was actually pretty revolutionary for the time. Real-time chat between multiple parties, sending game requests, offline message queueing, and so forth. We will ignore the fact that the ICQ client was incredibly insecure (my first experience with crackers involved a rather unpleasant experience with someone who was very insistant that I vote for them on some T100 thing). It was, on the whole, pretty cool. So AOL bought them, and let it languish horribly for the next decade, since it was a direct competator to AIM. If ICQ had remained independant, we'd probably all be using it instead of AIM or MSN.
Actually the story is more complicated than that.
I was on ICQ (number just over 1000, regretfully it wasn't 1337). AIM did not originally buy ICQ but they did purchase the codebase. AIM and ICQ were the exact same application for a while then since the two code bases were separate using different servers, they eventually split, AOL did a full purchase of them and I thought they would have died then as they were AIM but different.
So yeah they were the same code until time caused them to part then AOL tried to swallow the original and hide it under the carpet.
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Indeed, i've tried to convince my friends to switch to Jabber, but they all think "ICQ has more colors and everyone uses it, so it can't be wrong" and now I use Miranda+ICQ
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@cconroy said:
People still use ICQ? How 1997.
Simple rebuttal to that one: at least ICQ can handle sending offline messages. I think MSN only recently added support for that.
But yeah... I haven't used the ICQ client for years, but I still use ICQ every day. Miranda, Trillian, GAIM, whatever... Why bog down your machine with ICQ and MSN clients with completely different UIs?
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I used to use ICQ with gaim, but I just got sick of all the spam I kept recieving, so I've severed my ties from it completely. My number was between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000, so I considered myself vaguely awesome for being that low.
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@misha said:
@asuffield said:
It's a chat system that uses numbers instead of names to identify people. Enough said.
Ahh, but that allows users to show just how '1337 they are, by having much lower UIDs than everyone else, thus demonstrating that they've been talking about masturbation to stangers in other countries since *back in the day.*
A friend of my father discovered you could actually *pick* your UID during the registration process (by hand-crafting the registration request outside of the client software), back in the day. He picked out a few good ones (e.g. 11111111, 12345678, 10101010), registered them, and gave 'em out. Dad had 11111111 for a few months, but got sick of receiving dozens of "KEWL ID CAN I HAVE IT!?!" IMs.
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@merreborn said:
Dad had 11111111 for a few months, but got sick of receiving dozens of "KEWL ID CAN I HAVE IT!?!" IMs.
That's cool. Ummm, can I have it?
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I used to play around with ICQ, only because it could send free SMS messages (and if the user replied, it would pop up on your screen). I had fun sending SMS messages to random people :P.
The free SMS service isn't that good any more. They used to support Optus, Telstra and Vodafone (the three major mobile networks here in Australia), but now only Vodafone is supported.
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Here's an ICQ WTF for ya...
Way back when, around the time that AIM first came out and prior, the ICQ servers were very lenient on their authentication. Basically, they process defaulted to true instead of false during it's authentication check during log-in. Now this wasn't much of a problem at first and here is why. ICQ had an 8 character limit on passwords, and their client enforced this limit. Now when other clients came out that could attach to the ICQ servers, they did not enforce the 8 character password limit. This led to the following:
9 character password sent to ICQ. ICQ fails on password check. Default value is returned.
and remember the default was true. This meant you could enter anyones UID and any 9 character password and log in as them. It took them a little while to get that one fixed.
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Here's another little UI issue. I don't remember what version I have installed due to not using for a substantial amount of time, but when I got disconnected from the net it would pop up a box saying I've lost my connection which is mostly likely due to network connections problems and to "click here" for more information. The link obviously went to their website.
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@Kemp said:
Here's another little UI issue. I don't remember what version I have installed due to not using for a substantial amount of time, but when I got disconnected from the net it would pop up a box saying I've lost my connection which is mostly likely due to network connections problems and to "click here" for more information. The link obviously went to their website.
Let me guess, clicking for more info would raise an error, popping up a box saying you lost connection and to "click here" for more information, which would error, popping up a box saying you lost connection and to click....ARRRRRGHHHH!
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Nah, nothing that impressive, it just opened my browser (in almost all cases with an error page due to my net connection not being available).
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@Volmarias said:
It was actually pretty revolutionary for the time. Real-time chat between multiple parties
And only eight years after IRC was invented. How very revolutionary.
offline message queueing
Approximately thirty years after email was invented.
(People always think that these "IM" systems are somehow different from email. The only distinction is that they are proprietary, and usually have more arbitrary restrictions on the kind of data you can send)
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My own ICQ WTF story: The chat interface on the windows version circa 1998 could be set to, and was by default, a "split screen" for up to six people, wherein you can type and it will immediately appear on everyone's screen without hitting enter, then for seven or more it switches to the so-called "irc mode", (with an input box, scrolling chat window, and name list.) This, in itself, was not a WTF, it has a long, venerable history dating back as far as 'talk'.
The chat interface on the macintosh version did not provide the split screen mode, only providing 'IRC mode'. This is also not a WTF, and it's the better interface anyway, so I was fine with that.
Can anyone guess what the WTF was? There are two related aspects. One can be deduced from the above facts alone, for the other, i'll also state that the chat protocol, such as there is one, is in no way changed between the two modes.
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@Random832 said:
My own ICQ WTF story: The chat interface on the windows version circa 1998 could be set to, and was by default, a "split screen" for up to six people, wherein you can type and it will immediately appear on everyone's screen without hitting enter, then for seven or more it switches to the so-called "irc mode", (with an input box, scrolling chat window, and name list.) This, in itself, was not a WTF, it has a long, venerable history dating back as far as 'talk'.
The chat interface on the macintosh version did not provide the split screen mode, only providing 'IRC mode'. This is also not a WTF, and it's the better interface anyway, so I was fine with that.
Can anyone guess what the WTF was? There are two related aspects. One can be deduced from the above facts alone, for the other, i'll also state that the chat protocol, such as there is one, is in no way changed between the two modes.
OK, two questions, because I'm really curious [i]how[/i] they managed that.
Did messages only show up on the Mac version after a Windows user in 'talk' mode hit Enter? Or did they even show up at all?
And did Mac users' messages show up on Windows machines one character at a time, or all at once?
...Honestly, no matter [i]how[/i] that was implemented, it seems unbelievably broken...
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Messages only showed up on the mac version if a windows user hit enter (thus allowing windows users to talk behind the mac users' back, by hitting backspace instead)
Mac users showed up on windows machines one character at a time, even if the mac user didn't hit enter, allowing the windows users to "spy" on them.
To a 13-year-old, this was all quite disturbing.
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@asuffield said:
(People always think that these "IM" systems are somehow different from email. The only distinction is that they are proprietary, and usually have more arbitrary restrictions on the kind of data you can send)
The fact that you can (usually) tell when someone is actually online is a feature that email lacks, though admittedly, immediately pressing things should be handled over the phone. Putting some email and IRC features together in one package is a nice benefit though, even if not exactly "revolutionary."
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ICQ? How quaint!
Use some other service. I'm finding gtalk/jabber to be the new killer one. It's nifty to be in Gmail and just start randomly talking to people in your contact list. Couple that with pidgin... ahhh... life is good.
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@asuffield said:
@Volmarias said:
It was actually pretty revolutionary for the time. Real-time chat between multiple parties
And only eight years after IRC was invented. How very revolutionary.
offline message queueing
Approximately thirty years after email was invented.
(People always think that these "IM" systems are somehow different from email. The only distinction is that they are proprietary, and usually have more arbitrary restrictions on the kind of data you can send)
That's exactly what I was thinking after I read that post. Although saying that email is better than IM is a bit silly. Even if you had an email client just like an IM client, there would be substantial lag time because of the way email travels from server to server as opposed to how IM travels from peer to server and directly to peer without any queuing or virus checking or spam filtering.
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@asuffield said:
@tster said:
(People always think that these "IM" systems are somehow different from email. The only distinction is that they are proprietary, and usually have more arbitrary restrictions on the kind of data you can send)
Although saying that email is better than IM is a bit silly. Even if you had an email client just like an IM client, there would be substantial lag time because of the way email travels from server to server as opposed to how IM travels from peer to server and directly to peer without any queuing or virus checking or spam filtering.
I didn't say it was better, just that there's nothing really special about IM. I know that it has "instant" in the name, but it is not actually any faster than email (yes, I've measured), unless you happen to have extra processing (virus/spam scanners, etc) on one and not on the other - there's no particular reason why that should be the case.
The good MTAs do not queue mail if they are capable of immediate delivery; if all the hosts involved are online and responsive, delivery begins as soon as the mail is accepted. If you do not deliver mail to your desktop via SMTP, you may see some latency before your email client notices the new mail on the server (there's no push-notify in POP3 and nobody implements the one in IMAP, so most clients only query the server every few minutes), but that's a quirk of implementation and not a fundamental limit.
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(there's no push-notify in POP3 and nobody implements the one in IMAP
Evolution seems to keep the IMAP connection alive/open when I have it open... Is it using some kind of notify system, or does it just leave the connection open?
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I never said it was any better, I just said that it wouldn't have the problems icq does.
