Hi, is it possible for AOL Instant Messenger to work in escargot because there are occasional phoenix issues and it will be very nice MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger to work in escargot.
In case of problems there is a very long delay and no messages are received and no messages are sent and when you log in, sometimes this does not let you in and creates problems when logging in to AOL Instant Messenger. lately there are a lot of problems.
Unfortunately, no. Theres a whole technical post explaining why it most likely isn’t possible.
To be sorry it would be very good for both programs to work in escargot. Thank you for the information.
It could work, but it may not. Don’t know when they will start working on the AIM frontend.
It’s definitely going to be considered, we just don’t know how much work it’d be to integrate it with Escargot yet.
Also if other people are going to respond, they should at least listen to people that have direct knowledge about Escargot (e.g., me).
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Nina team workin’ on it tho
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yeah but, it’s not escargot (which might be good since python kind of limited escargot in the first place?)
I WROTE THAT LOL
come on, no need reply dude who last seen month ago
I realise this post is super old, but I didn’t resurrect it, but I’ll take advantage anyway. The issues EpicTaco404 pointed out are things we already have ironed out, but are concerns that many others have brought up.
I thought maybe I could give some insight for the curious. My post is working under the assumption we’re only talking about the original clients, our future updated AIM client (based on AIM 4.8) will support more MSN-like features more accurate, however there are a few work-arounds, so I’ll mention the ones EpicTaco404 brought up.
Profiles
AIM has no “status text”, compared to MSN, it has profiles, which are more simillar to HTML but uses AIM’s markdown.
Firstly, AIM does indeed have a status text, however earlier clients do not support it. It was originally created for iChat (which used the AIM OSCAR protocol originally) specifically, but was later included in newer versions of AIM. I don’t think the original AIM client supports it until around later 5.x, though I don’t recall the specific versions off the top of my head.
Secondly, AIM does not use Markdown, it’s just HTML, but a very limited HTML which was more of a conversion of richtext formatting than anything else, in fact the MIME type is text/x-aol or text/aolrtf but it’s HTML 3.x compatible. Markdown wasn’t even invented yet when AIM came out.
Lack of Nudges/Buzzes
MSN has Nudges, Yahoo has Buzzes, AIM has… nothing…
AIM has popup notifications, which is implemented in all clients to display them, but not to send them directly. Some people did make programs years ago that would cause AIM to send these notifications, the most famous being “AIMPopup”. The name popup is sort of confusing, but basically it was just a little dialog box with the screenname and a message (usually not including, AIMPopup couldn’t send messages) from the person who sent it.
So the easiest solution for us is if a nudge or buzz is sent, we just change it to a popup for AIM. It isn’t as pretty, but it works. Later versions of AIM can implement this properly.
Buddy Names =/= Emails and Usernames
They work too different than what MSN and Yahoo have. Underscore names worked fine on 5.9, but as when i got to 4.7, AIM locked itself up telling me a name was invalid.
The original limitation for AIM was alphanumeric (and space) only and cannot start with a number. Underscores have never been a valid character, the only reason 5.9 accepts them is because it accepts email addresses as login and buddy names; in fact to clarify, this is a bug in later versions of 5.x, as underscore shouldn’t be allowed unless it’s in an email address. Earlier versions support buddies as email addresses as usernames with underscores of course, but not before AIM 3.5.
Our solution for this issue is: usernames must fit the original style (A-Z, 0-9, space) or be email addresses, or ICQ UIN. That means that you can’t have an underscore, but oh well, compatibility is more important.
Also, MSN allows the user to put emoticons on their username.
This isn’t a username though, this is just a display name. AIM has this too, it’s just called aliases, ICQ also has them. Whether or not you can set your alias or see other aliases depends on how old the client you are using is… and whether or not the server you are using even has it implemented, which currently no running server does implement properly.
We have aliases in our coming server, and they can be set to unicode characters or whatever. There is a hard limit of 96 characters that can be sent to AIM though, the rest wouldn’t be shown. But really if someone has an alias/display name that long, they’re just being annoying.
Warns
This is one of the unique AIM features that i know no other IM has. This won’t work on Escargot because of it only being in AIM.
Warnings do two things: they obviously notify the user they were warned, but they also, and more importantly, change the rate limit of the user. This is easily transferred to MSN/WLM by using one of the various methods of sending users a notification of server information, and then just changing their client’s rate limit. Since the rate limit is controlled on the server, even though MSN has no rate limit display like AIM, it doesn’t matter, you can still limit them. Of course MSN users won’t be able to see other user’s warning levels, but warnings were never popular anyway, blocking was always much popular. Another option would be to display the user’s warning level as a part of their status text in MSN, but this would be a hacky way to do it.
Conclusion
Sometimes things which seem incompatible actually have similar functionality. There are certainly limitations, like file transfers between different types clients has limitations, but not is impossible with proxies, so long as the clients support them (later AIM does, earlier does not).
Second, you have the think about the things like usernames more broadly than “well, MSN and Yahoo allow underscore, therefore AIM will be an issue,” and instead think “do we really need underscores outside of email logins? No”
I hope that clears up some things for everyone interested, and if you have any more questions like that let me know. We’re working on getting AIM/ICQ compatibility up soon, which is why we’ve worked out all these details. That’s also why we’re getting more active with community outreach on our new twitter, youtube, even on discord, etc.
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