WTF is up with AIM?
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007The last two weeks AIM has gone to hell in a handbasket. While private chat still works normally, group chat (aka chat rooms) has become almost unusable. People are being locked out of group chat left and right, and for no apparent reason. At first I thought AOL might be updating their servers one at a time, as initially it was just one person at a time being locked out of the Daria chat room I frequent. But the last few days have seen multiple people being locked out simultaneously. Currently it is unknown if anyone is able to access that chat room: five of us who frequent the room are all locked out, and are using IRC as I type this.
As I mentioned here, some of us who are especially computer savvy have been experimenting with other chat systems, including IRC and Jabber. The general consensus appears to be to use IRC. It remains to be seen if AIM will fix itself or if a full migration to IRC will be necessary to maintain chat among Daria fans. Ironically, there’s still an old IRC channel for Daria fans that’s been running since the late 90’s.