damont | Asking the LJ Braintrust: AIM problems

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When I logged into AIM this afternoon, my previously existing buddy list was gone, and there was a new category called "orphans" that had a half dozen or so "buddies" in it that all appear to be spammers. Does anyone have any idea what may have happened? The AIM website is unhelpful.

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From:

craig trader (from livejournal.com)

This is correct: Pidgin will pull the buddy list for each account from that account's service.

From:

dr-zrfq.livejournal.com

Meebo also does this, at least by default.

From:

craig trader (from livejournal.com)

Given that buddy list is a feature of the service, it wouldn't make sense to implement it locally (other than to include data attributes that the service doesn't support).

From what I understand, the 'orphans' group is a feature of Pidgin that shouldn't be necessary. The recommendations I've seen suggest that you should be able to delete the 'orphans' group, restart Pidgin, and then things should clean themselves up. You may need to go so far as to delete your AIM account and recreate it, at which point Pidgin will re-cache your buddies from AIM.

From:

dr-zrfq.livejournal.com

Simply deleting the orphans group and restarting Pidgin did not restore the previous buddy list. It appears that the only thing that can be done at this point is to recreate the buddy list manually (which would have to be done if I deleted and restarted the AIM account as well).