A Note About Yahoo Messenger
Since this seems to happen every couple of days, I want to clarify something. The IM client I use, Trillian, has a very annoying habit of resetting my Yahoo status to “Available” and clearing my auto-responding away message whenever my connection to Yahoo flakes. And, it tends to do so with annoying frequency, usually when I’m actually not here.
So, here’s a good rule of thumb. If you see me set as “Available” on Yahoo, but not on any other protocol/SN*, it’s a glitch, and it’s extremely unlikely that I’m actually there. And, if you IM me, and I don’t respond within a few minutes, I’m definitely not there.
This post brought to you by the fact that I just came back from a 4-hour road trip to find Yahoo set to “Available” (but nothing else), and over two dozen different Yahoo windows open, with people chatting as if I were actually there. Which is why I stopped using Yahoo for awhile (and because this was happening nearly every hour).
===========
* = The screen name I use for work (which is not on Yahoo) is exempt from this guideline. It has a separate buddy list, on a different client, usually on a different computer, and therefore has no relation to my personal accounts.
December 27th, 2008 at 23:55:23
have you tried Digsby yet?
December 28th, 2008 at 0:31:13
Give pidgin.im a try, maybe?
December 28th, 2008 at 0:34:45
I feel like a broken record saying this, but I’ve tried Pidgin, and I didn’t like it, for a multitude of reasons. Most of it was because of a large collection of small things, but the big one is that I hate the way it handles contacts with multiple SNs.
December 28th, 2008 at 0:35:44
I haven’t actually, but it looks intriguing (possibly a lot of fluff I’ll never use, though, I could care less about social networking extensions/features). I’ll take a look sometime, thanks for the suggestion.
December 28th, 2008 at 1:24:46
Im sorry for contributing to those windows Natasha. I just figured that you were “noob filtering” or something.
December 28th, 2008 at 6:19:20
I used to have that issue a lot. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s much of a fix. I’m not sure if this is a Yahoo protocol issue or a Trillian bug.
December 28th, 2008 at 9:09:51
I suppose you could make a label of “actually available” for when you’re actually using it, and hope anyone who just sees “available” by itself knows it’s not right?
(Oh, I probably should admit that I’ve never actually used Trillian, usually I use either Pidgin/GAIM (or occasionally the official client if I need to transfer files, which Pidgin/GAIM seems to fail at for some reason).)
December 28th, 2008 at 11:00:02
*giggles* I have not had that issue with Trillian… but thought you might be away, as only one of your nicks was available. So, I picked up on that.
*hugs*
December 28th, 2008 at 11:26:18
But you’re NEVER available
I’ve had that same problem with Trillian, the people I’ve set to Always see me as offline can see me as Online when I use Trillian YIM.
December 28th, 2008 at 12:47:37
The problem with that happening here is the router is trying to remove expired connections from its routing table for open ports, and occasionally, it removes one of my active sessions. Therefore, when I come home from work, I get a bunch of emo babble like, “WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME?!?!?!” and about 50 of those little “buzz” things in Yahoo IM. Yeah. If someone doesn’t respond to you in a few minutes, chances are, they’re not there.
I’m hardly on IM anymore for that reason, because people love to be clowns.
December 28th, 2008 at 12:55:57
I don’t even know if I got you on IM and which IM’s I got you on. We never talk online… maybe we should ;P