AIM weirdness
Ed Anson
all use iChat on MBPs. But now I am not able to contact my daughter. But
here's what is weird:
When I log in, my daughter shows offline, but my son shows online.
At the same time, my son sees both of us online, and my daughter sees my
son online but me offline.
But when my son logs in using my MBP, he still sees my daughter online
and can connect with no problem.
Before I got my MBP, I was able to contact my daughter from a different
Mac but using the same account.
Can anybody make sense of this and suggest what might be going wrong?
/Ed
Fred McKenzie
Ed Anson <EdA...@comcast.net> wrote:
Ed-
I don't know the answer, but also noticed a change in AIM. It showed up
when I attempted to find user information for an AOL member. I couldn't
find the AOL user name, so I tried mine and found it had been reassigned
to someone outside of AOL!
Apparently AOL has sold or transferred AIM to http://www.bebo.com. "AIM
profiles are now Bebo profiles, please sign in with your AOL or AIM
username." I tried to sign in but failed, using both my AOL user name
and by adding @AOL.COM to it.
I haven't pursued it any further, but it appears necessary to register
with BEBO to make it work as before.
I can still see people on my AOL Buddy List, but haven't tried to
contact any of them recently.
Fred
Jolly Roger
Those symptoms are similar to ones I experienced with an AIM account I
had in the past (and still have, but don't use anymore). I eventually
came to the conclusion the problem was with the account itself on the
server, which is outside of my control. You might try toggling the
"invisible" setting on both your and your daughter's AIM accounts, in an
effort to fix the problem. Otherwise, I'm afraid you're going to be
stuck with contacting AOL for assistance. And I don't hold out much hope
for you getting assistance from them. So you may be forced to do what I
did - create a new AIM account.
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JR
Ed Anson
Thanks to those who made suggestions. As it turns out, I discovered the
cause of the problem -- and it turned out to be weirder than anybody
thought.
Back when AIM was working between me and my daughter, I entered her AIM
account name into my Palm PDA so I'd have it if I needed it at a
different computer. Unfortunately, I misspelled it (one character off).
It didn't matter though, because iChat had the correct address.
More recently, I added software that syncs my PDA to the Mac's address
book. Merging the information resulted in two AIM entries for her,
including both the correct and the incorrect account name. Then, when I
fired up iChat, it synced up with Address Book, taking the bogus name
along with the correct one. Everything still looked normal, except that
my daughter appeared to be offline.
Because of the auto-sync between iChat and Address Book, I had
difficulty correcting the error once I detected it. If I corrected it in
Address Book, the bogus information got "restored" from iChat. Because
iChat had decided that the bogus name was the primary account name, it
wouldn't let me just delete that one. I finally had to delete the buddy
list entry altogether and create it anew (after updating Address Book).
After all that, I was finally able to have a belated Christmas chat with
my daughter who lives 3000 miles away.
/Ed