Thousands of ICQ Numbers Deleted

BondGamer writes "Many ICQ users woke up and found their ICQ numbers were no longer working. There is a topic on the ICQ support with more than 1,500 replies. There are pages upon pages of other topics asking what happened. As of yet, there has been no official response from AOL about what has happened."

Re:Still Around

[hclyff]

People still use ICQ? I wonder if it's really seeing any significant numbers of new users, or if it's just the old people sticking around.

ICQ is still doing pretty good in Europe, I think. At least in my country. It is quite surprising when you consider that the official client is obnoxious piece of shit loaded with ads and crapware. Unofficial clients sometimes stop working, because someone decided it is good idea to do some changes in protocol and not tell anyone.

It shows that you don't have to be good at something, as long as you have critical mass of users locked in.

Want to check, but don't have ICQ installed?

[Raven737]

I didn't use or even installed ICQ for at least 5 years
but wanted to check if my really old account with a nice 7 digit account number was still active.
Used: http://go.icq.com/ [icq.com] (no installation needed) to check.. and it is still working, guess i got lucky.
Now for another 5 years of not using it (but of course wanting to keep it :)

My guesses

[Dragon Rojo]

My 7 digit uin it's still active, I remember it like my phone number. Ahh those were the days. I left icq after all my contacts went to yahoo or msn.

My guesses:

1.- Someone broke in and messed up the db
2.- A random clean up?
3.- Publicity? (As stated in comments above)
4.- Server failure

Re:Still Around

[suv4x4]

I'm from central Europe, and here everybody is using ICQ. It's gone so far that ICQ is synonymous with IM, and people exchange ICQ UINs instead of phone numbers...

Same in Eastern Europe, although Skype appears to be catching up as a replacement.

Just few days ago I was talking to friends about the new ICQ6, and the conversation went along the lines of:

ME: you gotta check the new ICQ, they dumped the silly flash voice/cam, the terrible horn and oh-oh sounds. It's a lot better.

THEM: great! so are you switching back to ICQ (note: they are all on ICQ)

ME: no, but .. I at least won't start it with disgust anymore.

And just as I gave them this compliment (it is a compliment! i hated the damn thing), now this story runs. They're out of luck, for sure.

Re:Still Around

[Virtual_Raider]

Apparently everyone and their dog use it in Russia. Right before they turned GAIM into Pidgin I installed GAIM 1.5 and logged on to my neglected yahoo and ICQ accounts. My 6 digit ICQ was still working up until this morning, and every single day I get at least 3 Russian girls (or so they claim) wanting to chat, and at least 2 spam messages in Cyrillic trying to get me to click in some shady URL that I wouldn't touch with Firefox barricaded behind the Proxomitron and a Firewall on an unpluged computer powered-off =P

At least one of the alleged Russkys I actually started chatting with is cute. They sure know how to make them in the Ukraine ;)

Re:Still Around

[Altrag]

It seems that certain IMs just gained popularity in certain parts of the world for whatever reason. I was in the Philippines a few months ago and yahoo is the "IM synonym" there. ICQ used to be the big thing in my circle of friends back in the late 90s (it was pretty much the ONLY thing back then). Then moved to yahoo for a while (does ICQ even have webcam support in 2007?) and its sort of settled on MSN as my non-geek friends started to pile up. Don't really know why that came to be -- whether its just because its packaged with Windows or because they had far superior webcam support for a while there, or perhaps some other factor -- as I was one of the last people I know to switch up to MSN (back in my "lets hate on M$ cause its cool" party-lining days:P).

Re:Obli...

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming your ICQ number is up to 9 digits, it's chances of being contained in a 9 GB movie are almost 1 [google.com].

Re:Still Around

[StarfishOne]

In the beginning the client was quite nice and simple. Later on it became soo bloated I decided to follow my friends and to start using the MSN Messenger which was sooo nice and simple. Now the latter is also filled with useless features. :(

Don't these companies understand that there are many people who just want a simple, graphical chat window?

And yes, I also use IRC in a screen session every day.. but unfortunately just 5-10 other _technical_ friends are there. My experience is that it's nearly impossible to teach quite a number of less technical people how to use IRC.

ICQ Spam - ICQ6- being force added = crapware

[gadlaw]

I hardly ever turn icq on any longer on account of the Russian/Czech/Ukranian spam. Very annoying and last time I turned it on some damn spammer who kept on spamming on me 'added me' - annoyed I checked and yep, my preferences were to not allow anyone to add me but for some reason spambot boy was able to. I don't even know what the purpose of doing that is but I definitely don't like it and don't turn the icq on for just that reason.

Count me as 'affected'...

[HerculesMO]

I had a 6 digit ICQ number starting with "333".... and it's lost. I took pride in looking at that as my 'nerd' badge of honor since I was on the ICQ train so long before others.

Needless to say, I haven't used ICQ in a long time since then, and I won't be using it any time again.

Fuck AOL.

Syntax Highlighting

[nbritton]

It would be cool if the English language had colorized syntax highlighting.