More Reasons I Miss AOL Instant Messenger

Yesterday’s article, “I Miss AOL Instant Messenger (“article” sounds much more professional than “blog whose third paragraph I wrote while on the john”) seemed to get a lot of people reminiscing about the good old days of instant messenging, myself included. Tons of you reminded me that there was far more to the program than tracking the idle times of people you had crushes on and putting up away messages that attempted to convey your depth via the obscurity of the lyrics contained therein.


Warning Wars-Oh, did I love me a good warning war. For those of you unfamiliar with AIM, it featured a “warn” button, which, when pressed, told the person you were conversing with that they had been warned. Each warning you received incremenetally increased your warning limit, which in turn restricted your ability to send messages until you were ultimately locked out of the program for an hour or two. I suppose in theory warnings were designed to stop strangers from harassing you (if that was their intent, they failed miserably), but in practice, you would only warn your friends. And it was done preemptively, because the instant you warned them, their ability to warn you back was hampered. The truest victory in a warning war was achieved by jacking up your friend’s warning level upwards of 80% by IMing them from a second account that they didn’t recognize as yours, then exhausting that account’s ability to warn them, too.


Multiple Account Block Check-As mentioned in the previous paragraph, AIM permitted you a bevy of different account names. One of the perks of this was you could check if someone had blocked your main account after a heated war of words (thus appearing offline to you) by singing on as a secondary name to see if they were indeed still online and visible. If this were the case, you would typically IM them from the second name in order to get them to reply, then initiate – you guessed it – a warning war.



Pretend to Be a Chick and Seduce Your Friends-To be frank, I always found this gag a little off-putting, because it calls into question the heterosexuality of the seducer far more than that of the seduced (like the time Cartman blew Butters in his sleep and snapped a photo of it then attempted to use it as evidence that Butters was gay). You would use a secondary AIM account to contact a buddy and pretend to be a female, typically claiming to be a friend of a girl they knew. (It always shocked me how quickly guys were willing to believe a strange woman wanted to flirt with them, but maybe that’s how men should think and I just have horrible self-esteem.) Once your friend was convinced of your womanhood (usually a picture of a random girl was enough to accomplish this), things quickly spiraled out of control, with all sorts of cybering and picture exchanges taking place. Bonus points for revealing your identity after your friend confessed to ejaculating.

Tagged as: aol instant messenger.