Help My Away Messages Grow

November 28, 2006 9:07 AM

I am trying to create a brief weekly calendar for work of upcoming events that will be posted as an AOL IM away message that people can check throughout the week. How can I create a longer AIM away message than the default allows?

I would prefer to type an away message that is about 3-4 times longer than the characters allowed. I'm running AIM v5.5.3415 and Dead AIM on Win XP. I need to stick with XP, but anything else can change. Are there any add-on programs, hacks, newer versions, other IM programs that people on AIM can view the away messages to, or browser clients (meebo?) that would allow me to create longer or unlimited away messages?

Does not have to be free. That you very much for the help.

posted by andoatnp to technology (7 comments total)

You may have ruled this out, but the most obvious solution to me is to just give a URL in your away message - the URL goes to the calendar as a web page, etc. blah blah blah...
posted by chr1sb0y at 9:11 AM on November 28, 2006

We do already have an online calendar that is much more comprehensive. This would just be an abbreviated version that pulls out the important stuff, so we would like to keep it as a stand-alone away message. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
posted by andoatnp at 9:14 AM on November 28, 2006

The restriction is placed on the away message by AOL, not by the clients. I haven't seen a way to do this and suspect it's impossible.
posted by null terminated at 10:05 AM on November 28, 2006

I agree with null. This seems like a system limitation. It sounds like what you really need is an AIM bot.
posted by jjg at 10:28 AM on November 28, 2006

I gave it a provisional look and I think an AIMbot might be able to do what we want.

A longer away message would be preferred, and I'm still holding out for hope that someone can come up with a solution that will allow me to do that.
posted by andoatnp at 10:48 AM on November 28, 2006

I have never seen an away message with a longer length than dictacted by AIM. However, I have seen AIM profiles with much longer lengths and even multiple pages. Googling AIM and 'unlimited' gives you some options. Here's one:

http://www.reaim.com/
posted by pinksoftsoap at 1:01 PM on November 28, 2006

An AIMBot is the way you want to go. I have no idea what AOL has on their site at the above link but you can just use your existing account and the script here. 50% of that could be trimmed out since you want to respond to EVERYTHING with the same answer.

I actually have a chunk of code you could use for this; drop me an email and I'll send it your way as a windows executable if you like (grod love ActiveState's PerlDev kit...); it'll read the contents of a .cfg file and simply spash them at anyone who messages it.
posted by phearlez at 4:54 PM on November 28, 2006