AIM Ending This Year

AIM will be discontinued on December 15, 2017

Amazing to see the Invision Power Services Form Board™ System Version 1.3 software outlive AIM. AIM seemed like it would never go away, but I got this email today informing me about it. I wonder if Yahoo Instant Messanger's demise isn't far off either then. MSN Messenger has been discontinued in favor of Skype as well (though knowing Microsoft it might still work lol)

The messenger fields here probably need some love, GTalk could be renamed to Hangouts while we're at it too.

But idk, maybe they can be removed outright instead? Custom profile fields probably do the trick just fine and it's probably not great to constantly be updating them. Though I'm not sure the logistics of converting the fields to custom profile fields so nobody loses any data.

(i figure this is more feedback/discussion than a feature request? I don't have any direct answers for what to do but it's definitely something that these services baked into the forum software are sunsetting)

We'll figure out a plan of action for this at some point next year, definitely.

We put a lot of things into deprecation that were removed this year, and taking these out would be the next logical step.

ps: why comic sans

QUOTE (John @ Oct 6 2017, 03:46 PM)

ps: why comic sans

just a weird habit I have

The 90's called and it wan't it font back lol.

All jokes aside, it's said to see AIM go, I remember a lot of good memories of the AOL desktop and all the weird chatrooms it had.

I agree with changing the name{s} like to jabber or facebook.

Kesha you can make your own AIM like messenger script - http://www.intramessenger.com

QUOTE

I agree with changing the name{s} like to jabber or facebook.

What's the point, though? I think if a board owner wants someone to be able to input those; they should just do it with the custom profile fields. They are also a maintenance nightmare. If we were having this conversation not too long ago we'd be saying "let's add a myspace button."

When this version of IPB was first released, instant messengers were just the way everyone communicated externally so it made some sense to have these buttons as a universal feature for all forums. Not anymore. There are too many different ways of communicating now and they are forever changing.

Even Skype seems fine right now but it's losing market share to discord every day and microsoft is doing a terrible job of managing it (imho).

We can't keep up with messengers, and really, we just shouldn't bother.

As a side note, I would love to see a simple messenger system on these forums one day similar to facebook messenger, but we're not anywhere near able to do that yet.

yeah, even when those messengers were popular different communities were big on different messengers. Nowadays there's just so many messengers out there and the landscape is constantly changing I don't think it'd make too much sense to play cat and mouse with em.

QUOTE (John @ Oct 7 2017, 11:41 AM)

"let's add a myspace button."

Or how about we not...ever.

Oddly enough, I rarely see people offer up aim anymore. More often than not it's Discord or Slack. So why not either just use the custom profile fields, or possibly make a space for your discord/slack name?

Just a suggestion. I know I haven't used AIM in well over a year.

He is posting this because the messenger fields are built into the core of the system. They're in the UserCP for members to fill out and display on default profiles.

I think he knows he can do that. We need to remove all of the dead messengers and going forward we won't try to replace them with whatever is hot now as it's always changing. We'll leave it up to custom fields and whatever admins decide they want to collect from users in that department.

Going with the custom fields is better anyway.

I always hide everything that isn't a custom field or the birthday field, so it's just a bunch of unnecessary CSS for me to include.